PAkistan has carried out its threat and blocked Wikipedia for alleged “blasphemous content”. The online encyclopedia was blocked nationwide on Friday “after failing to respond to our repeated correspondence to remove the blasphemous content and failing to meet the deadline,” a spokesman for the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) said on Saturday.
The authority had previously given Wikipedia an ultimatum until Friday evening and restricted access to the website for 48 hours until it expired. Until then, the platform has time to remove the relevant content, it said. The authority did not say what the specific content was.
Wikipedia has “removed some of the material, but not all,” said the PTA spokesman. The website will “remain blocked until all offending material is removed”.
A reporter from Pakistan’s AFP news agency confirmed on Saturday that he could not access the site from a mobile phone. The Wikimedia Foundation – the non-profit foundation that manages Wikipedia – responded by saying the lockdown denies “the fifth most populous country in the world access to the largest free repository of knowledge”.
“If this continues, everyone will also be denied access to the knowledge, history and culture of Pakistan,” it said in a statement. The knowledge platform had previously faced restrictions on some of its pages.
In recent years, the Pakistani authorities have repeatedly blocked online media – including the video platform YouTube because of a film about the Prophet Mohammed that was perceived as Islamophobic, which had triggered protests in several countries.