Pakistan has asked YouTube and TikTok do impose tighter censorship on content it deems “vulgar, indecent and immoral, nude and hate speech”and to prevent it from being accessed from within the country.
The request from the Pakistan Telecom Authority (PTA), also “directed” YouTube to create “an effective content monitoring and moderation mechanism” to ensure that any of the above-mentioned material is blocked from within the country. TikTok got away with merely being asked to do better on content monitoring, which means the “final warning” issued to the company in July 2020 appears not to have been quite-so-final.
“PTA has done so keeping in view the extremely negative effects of indecent/immoral/nude content available on YouTube and to prevent repugnant discord due to the presence of hate speech and sectarian material,” the body said in a statement.
The request is the latest in a long line of moves by the Pakistani government to censor information published online. In February, the Pakistani government imposed a law that required social media companies to remove illegal content within 24 hours. The law gave the government power to decide which content was illegal.
YouTube in particular has been a sore point. The video-streaming site was blocked in the Pakistan between 2012 and 2016 for failing to remove an anti-Islamic film.
The site was blocked again in November 2017, along with Facebook, DailyMotion, Twitter, and Instagram, in response to a protests in Faizabad that lead to violent clashes with police. ®
source: The Register
