File photo. Banaras Khan—AFP
The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) on Saturday banned online encyclopedia Wikipedia for failing to block/remove “sacrilegious content” within a 48-hour deadline it had communicated to the platform earlier this week.
On Wednesday, the PTA had issued a statement confirming that it had degraded Wikipedia services in the country for failing to comply with earlier requests for the removal of objectionable content. In its statement, the regulator had claimed the website had failed to respond to its requests for an explanation or removal of the objectionable content. It had warned that it would completely block the website after 48 hours if the objectionable content were not removed.
Confirming that the deadline had expired, a spokesperson for the PTA told local media that the website had now been blocked for failing to comply with the regulator’s orders. They claimed that the decision could be revisited if Wikipedia removed the objectionable content that had already been conveyed to it by the PTA.
Wikipedia is a free, crowdsourced online encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone. It serves as an aggregator of information and is often used for basic research by people across the world, especially students. Pakistanis attempting to access it presently, however, are faced with a “this site can’t be reached” message.
The move has triggered outrage on social media, with Pakistanis lamenting the loss of an independent source of information. Some users have even suggested to the PTA to start editing the “offending” pages itself, rather than outright banning the platform and depriving millions from easy access to information that is useful for both work and education.
In a statement issued on Friday, the Wikimedia Foundation—a charity that runs Wikipedia—said it could not comply with the PTA’s request because it did not decide what content is included in the encyclopedia or how it is maintained. Stressing that this was by design so crowd-sourcing could allow it feature more neutral articles, it added: “We believe that access to knowledge is a human right. A block of Wikipedia in Pakistan denies the fifth most populous nation in the world access to the largest free knowledge repository. If it continues, it will also deprive everyone access to Pakistan’s history and culture,” it said.
“We hope that the Pakistan government joins with the Wikimedia Foundation in a commitment to knowledge as a human right and restores access to Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects promptly, so that the people of Pakistan can continue to receive and share knowledge with the world,” it added.
The PTA has a history of blocking entire platforms if they fail to submit to its demands to block or remove content it deems objectionable for the eyes of Pakistanis. In 2010, the regulator made global headlines for blocking Facebook and other websites over a contest to draw images of Islam’s Prophet. This was followed in 2012 with a ban on YouTube—that lasted four years—and, most recently, it briefly blocked popular platform TikTok in 2021 over “immoral and unlawful” content.
According to a briefing to the National Assembly Standing Committee on Information Technology and Telecom in 2019, the PTA said it had blocked over 900,000 URLs in the country for a wide range of reasons, including “blasphemous and pornographic content” and commentary against the state, judiciary or the armed forces.