Twitter is banned in Pakistan.

Earliar news was surrounding in national media as well international media too, that Pakistan has blocked twitter in Pakistan because it refused to remove material considered offensive to Islam. Pakistani officials said that they demand the twitter administration several times to stop and remove the ongoing “competition” of Prophet Muhammad’s (pbuh) caricatures. But they did not stopped it.

The move came hours after Interior Minister Rehman Malik's claim in a message posted on Twitter early this morning that no restrictions would be imposed on the popular micro-blogging site.

An estimated six million people use Twitter in Pakistan. Earlier, Malik himself tweeted that the government had no plans to impose restrictions on Twitter and Facebook.

The material was promoting a competition on Facebook to post images of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad, said Mohammad Yaseen, chairman of the Pakistan Telecommunication’s Authority. Many Muslims regard depictions of the prophet, even favorable ones, as blasphemous.

Ali Dayan Hasan, Pakistan director at Human Rights Watch, said the latest ban was "ill-advised, counter-productive and will ultimately prove to be futile as all such attempts at censorship have proved to be".

"The right to free speech is non-negotiable and if Pakistan is the rights-respecting democracy it claims to be, this ban must be lifted forthwith," he said.

Yaseen said Facebook agreed to address Pakistan’s concerns about the competition, but officials have failed to get Twitter to do the same.

”We have been negotiating with them until last night, but they did not agree to remove the stuff, so we had to block it,” said Yaseen.

Instructions to block the site came from Pakistan’s Ministry of Information Technology, said Yaseen.

”The ministry officials are still trying to make them (Twitter) agree, and once they remove that stuff, the site will be unblocked,” said Yaseen.

Pakistan’s government had asked Twitter to stop a discussion on Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), which was considered derogatory, Yaseen said, adding that “Twitter refused our request.”
Government and the website officials are in negotiations.

The PTA blocked the access to Twitter directly from the upstream links without notifying the ISPs, said Wahajuz Siraj, convener for Internet Services Providers Association of Pakistan (ISPAK).

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