Pakistanis disappointed by Twitter’s decision last month to block content deemed “ blasphemous” or “unethical” by their government expressed satisfaction when the company restored access to the blocked text and images early Wednesday.
The company, which is based in San Francisco, has the technical means to “withhold content” from users in specific countries in accordance with local laws, and first agreed to do so in response to complaints from the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority in May about crude drawings of the Prophet Muhammad, photographs of burning Qurans and messages from a handful of anti-Islam bloggers and three American porn stars.
Twitter explained the change of policy for Pakistan in a statement to the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, a database maintained by eight American law schools and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where the company posts a record of every request it agrees to honor.
“We have re-examined the requests and, in the absence of additional clarifying information from Pakistani authorities, have determined that restoration of the previously withheld content is warranted,” the company said in its statement. “The content is now available again in Pakistan.”
Bolo Bhi, a Pakistani civil rights group that had criticized the initial decision to censor content as unwarranted by the law regulating media, praised the reversal, but called “the lack of clarity over Twitter’s takedown mechanism and company policy on how it examines such requests” a cause for concern.
Sana Saleem, a founder of Bolo Bhi and an advocate for freedom of speech, told Agence France-Presse that Twitter’s position was still better than that of Facebook, which blocked users in Pakistan this month from the pages of a local rock band and several left-wing political groups.
In response to critics who call the blocking of content censorship, Twitter points out that it is one of the few Internet companies that make public the requests they honor. The company also reveals requests from governments to take down content twice a year in its own transparency report.