ISLAMABAD (TIP): Facebook has removed 85 percent of content considered insulting to Islam, but the high court in Pakistan’s capital is unhappy because there’s still “carpet bombing and drone attacks going on at our ideological boundaries”, The News reported.
“(The) ideology of Pakistan, Sunnah of Hazrat Muhammad (PBUH) and the common binding force for all Muslims in the shape of love and respect for the Prophet (PBUH) regardless of color, creed and sect are the boundaries under attack”, said justice Shaukat Aziz Siddiqui of the Islamabad high court (IHC) yesterday.
This is the same court that earlier this month ordered the Pakistan government to start an investigation into online “blasphemy” and threatened to block Facebook and other social media networks if they failed to censor content considered insulting to Islam.
Following that order, Pakistan’s interior minister Nisar Ali Khan reached out to Facebook to comply.+
“Now there’s only 15 percent of such content left to be removed”, the country’s interior secretary Arif Khan told the Islamabad High Court yesterday.
“Facebook agreeing to our demands is a big achievement,” said the head of the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority.
IHC isn’t that impressed.
“If social media wages a war against us, what remedy (do) we have and where (is) our information technology wing,” the IHC bench asked, chastising the IT ministry for “behaving like silent spectator and having no mechanism to deal with the issue.”
The IHC futrher sai it got no “satisfactory answer” from the state machinery on the preventive machinery against “he war waged through social media.”
The top leadership of Pakistan needs to raise a “national firewall enabling Pakistan to monitor its’s internet traffic and all the users”, justice Siddiqui said.
Pakistan previously banned Facebook for hosting allegedly blasphemous content for two weeks in 2010. As well, YouTube was unavailable from 2012 to 2016, over an amateur film about the Prophet Muhammad that led to global riots. (TOI)