Pakistan’s YouTube ban, one year later

Pakistan started banning access to YouTube a year ago as a response to violent protests against clips of the anti-Islamic film The Innocence of Muslims, and the company has kept up the ban ever since. Now, democracy activists are arguing that the Pakistani government uses those clips as a pretext to suppress freedom of speech.

“The Pakistani government has been blocking Internet content under the pretext of national interest, religion, and morality,” Hassan Belal Zaidi at the independent Internet rights advocacy group Bytes For All, based in Islamabad, told the Christian Science Monitor. “But it is actually trying to block any parallel discourse on the Internet and curtail freedom of expression of minorities... both political and religious, which speak against their persecution that happens quite often in Pakistan, and are not covered by mainstream media."