The Pakistan Government blocked micro blogging network, Twitter, for a few hours on Sunday, over blasphemous drawings related to Prophet Mohammed that emerged on the site, reports Dawn.com. The report states that the content appeared both on Facebook and Twitter and was part of a competition to post pictures of Prophet Muhammad on Facebook. Quoting Mohammad Yaseen, chairman of Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, the report further states that Facebook had apparently agreed to remove the offensive content but Twitter refused to remove the content which led to Pakistan’s Ministry of Information Technology issuing orders to block Twitter. A similar report from Pakistan's Express Tribune states that Pakistan's Ministry of Information Technology had made several unsuccessful requests to Twitter to remove the content, to which Twitter had apparently responded that it "cannot stop any individual doing anything of this nature on the website", which is quite strange considering that the company had made changes to its policies and technology in January this year, to enable Countries to censor tweets to comply with the local law authorities. Twitter had however noted later that it would withhold specific content on its own discretion. After a few hours, the ban was revoked following an order from the Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, to the concerned authorities, as indicated by the Express Tribune report, although it was unclear as to what led to the prime minister issuing orders to unblock the site. Previous Bans in Pakistan In May 2010, Pakistan’s Telecommunications Authority had blocked access to Facebook following a ruling in the…
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