ISLAMABAD – Threats, arrests, blocked accounts and restricted posts — BigBrother is watching more closely than ever in Pakistan as authoritiesaccelerate efforts to censor social networks, further reducing an alreadyshrunken space for dissent.
In the past 18 months, a slew of journalists, activists, and governmentopponents — both at home and overseas — have faced intimidation or thethreat of legal action for their online posts.
Censorship is already rife among Pakistan’s mainstream media, with theCommittee to Protect Journalists noting last year that the military had”quietly but effectively” imposed strict limits on the scope of generalnews reporting.
Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter were regarded as the last holdoutsof dissenting voices, but now that has changed.
In February, authorities announced the creation of a new enforcement arm toroot out social media users accused of spreading “hate speech and violence”as part of the crackdown.
Gul Bukhari, a columnist and sometime government critic who was brieflyabducted by unidentified men last year, said the assault on social mediawas carefully organised and coordinated.
“It is the last frontier they try to conquer,” Bukhari explained.
*- Silence dissent -*
Journalist Rizwan-ur-Rehman Razi was among the people targeted. He wasarrested in February at home in the eastern city of Lahore for publishing”defamatory and obnoxious” content against the state.
A few days earlier, he had criticized extra-judicial executions allegedlycommitted by the security forces, according to a copy of his tweets seen byAFP.
Released after two nights, he has not tweeted since, and his posts havebeen deleted.
The net cast by the crackdown is a wide one, with Shahzad Ahmad, directorof the digital security NGO Bytes for All, pointing to the harassment ofcivil rights activists, the political opposition, and bloggers.
According to Annie Zaman, an expert on cyber-censorship in Pakistan, thisis made possible by an all-encompassing 2016 law that prohibits onlineposts that are deemed to compromise state security or offend anything from”the glory of Islam” to non-defined notions of “decency and morality”.
“Because this law is vague, it gave more space to the authorities to censoronline,” Zaman said.
Offenders can face up to 14 years in prison.
The military signaled its involvement in the campaign as early as June lastyear, when spokesman Major General Asif Ghafoor boasted of the capacity tomonitor social media accounts during a televised press conference.
In a clear warning, Ghafoor briefly showed an image of what appeared to bespecific Twitter handles and names.
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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.
Facebook restricted more content in Pakistan than in any other country inthe first six months of 2018, according to its transparency figures fromthat time period, which are the most recently available.
The social media giant said it restricted the availability of 2,203 piecesof content in total — a seven-fold jump from the previous six months.
All but 87 of the items had been reported by the Pakistan TelecommunicationAuthority “as allegedly violating local laws prohibiting blasphemy,anti-judiciary content, and condemnation of the country’s independence,” itsaid.
The Pakistan Telecommunications Authority did not respond to requests forcomment.
*- ‘Overstepping boundaries’ -*
Twitter figures for the same time period showed a similar trend, withrequests to remove content from 3,004 accounts in Pakistan compared to 674in the second half of 2017.
A Twitter spokesman said the vast majority of the requests had come fromthe government, and stressed that the company had acquiesced to none ofthem.
“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, onemessage has been consistent that criticism of policies of the Pakistanmilitary will not be tolerated.”
Even those posting on social media from overseas have found themselvestargeted.
Twitter routinely sends out a notice to users notifying them when thecompany receives complaints that their posts have violated a country’s laws.
AFP has found dozens of users who received such a message warning they hadviolated Pakistani laws — including 11 who had tweeted from beyondPakistan’s borders, in countries such as Australia, the US and Canada.
The requests represent “a government censor overstepping jurisdictionboundaries”, said Jillian York, an expert at the Electronic FrontierFoundation (EFF), an American NGO. -APP/AFP
