ISLAMABAD:Threats, arrests, blocked accounts and restricted posts - Big Brother iswatching more closely than ever in Pakistan as authorities accelerate effortsto censor social networks, further reducing an already shrunken space fordissent. In the past 18 months, a slew of journalists, activists, andgovernment opponents - both at home and overseas - have faced intimidation orthe threat of legal action for their online posts. Censorship is already rifeamong Pakistan's mainstream media, with the Committee to Protect Journalistsnoting last year that the military had "quietly but effectively"imposed strict limits on the scope of general news reporting.
Platforms such asFacebook and Twitter were regarded as the last holdouts of dissenting voices,but now that has changed. In February, authorities announced the creation of anew enforcement arm to root out social media users accused of spreading"hate speech and violence" as part of the crackdown. Gul Bukhari, acolumnist and sometime government critic who was briefly abducted byunidentified men last year, said the assault on social media was carefullyorganized and coordinated. "It is the last frontier they try toconquer," Bukhari explained.
Silence dissent
JournalistRizwan-ur-Rehman Razi was among the people targeted. He was arrested inFebruary at home in the eastern city of Lahore for publishing "defamatoryand obnoxious" content against the state. A few days earlier, he hadcriticized extra-judicial executions allegedly committed by the securityforces, according to a copy of his tweets seen by AFP. Released after twonights, he has not tweeted since, and his posts have been deleted.
The net cast bythe crackdown is a wide one, with Shahzad Ahmad, director of the digitalsecurity NGO Bytes for All, pointing to the harassment of civil rightsactivists, the political opposition, and bloggers. According to Annie Zaman, anexpert on cyber-censorship in Pakistan, this is made possible by an all-encompassing2016 law that prohibits online posts that are deemed to compromise statesecurity or offend anything from "the glory of Islam" to non-definednotions of "decency and morality". "Because this law is vague,it gave more space to the authorities to censor online," Zaman said.Offenders can face up to 14 years in prison.
The militarysignalled its involvement in the campaign as early as June last year, whenspokesman Major General Asif Ghafoor boasted of the capacity to monitor socialmedia accounts during a televised press conference. In a clear warning, Ghafoorbriefly showed an image of what appeared to be specific Twitter handles andnames. Facebook and Twitter transparency reports show the crackdown was alreadywell underway last year, with a huge spike in requests by the Pakistanigovernment seeking to censor online activity.
Facebookrestricted more content in Pakistan than in any other country in the first sixmonths of 2018, according to its transparency figures from that time period,which are the most recently available. The social media giant said itrestricted the availability of 2,203 pieces of content in total - a seven-foldjump from the previous six months. All but 87 of the items had been reported bythe Pakistan Telecommunication Authority "as allegedly violating locallaws prohibiting blasphemy, anti-judiciary content, and condemnation of thecountry's independence," it said. The Pakistan TelecommunicationsAuthority did not respond to requests for comment.
'Oversteppingboundaries'
Twitter figuresfor the same time period showed a similar trend, with requests to removecontent from 3,004 accounts in Pakistan compared to 674 in the second half of2017. A Twitter spokesman said the vast majority of the requests had come fromthe government, and stressed that the company had acquiesced to none of them."The authorities are no longer hiding their agenda (or policy) to silenceinternet-mediated dissent," said Rabia Mehmood, a researcher for AmnestyInternational. "While the current censorship is exceptionally intense,over the years, one message has been consistent that criticism of policies ofthe Pakistan military will not be tolerated."
Even thoseposting on social media from overseas have found themselves targeted. Twitterroutinely sends out a notice to users notifying them when the company receivescomplaints that their posts have violated a country's laws. AFP has founddozens of users who received such a message warning they had violated Pakistanilaws - including 11 who had tweeted from beyond Pakistan's borders, incountries such as Australia, the US and Canada. The requests represent "agovernment censor overstepping jurisdiction boundaries", said JillianYork, an expert at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an American NGO. -AFP