The Pakistan government blocked access to YouTube today in protest at its ‘sacrilegious’ content.
The move comes just a day after the country blocked Facebook in outrage over a page that encouraged users to submit images of the Prophet Mohammed.
The government is challenging the power of the world wide web in a growing crackdown against sites deemed offensive to the country’s majority Muslim population.
Today access to encyclopaedia site Wikipedia and photo-sharing site Flickr was also restricted. But resourceful internet users simply switched to micro-blogging site Twitter to broadcast their protests against the crackdown to the world.
However, there are fears today that Twitter could become the next target as Pakistani traffic to the site surged.
The regulatory body said it has blocked more than 450 Internet links containing offensive material, but it is unclear how many of the links were blocked in the last two days.
The Facebook page ‘Everybody Draw Mohammed Day!’ encourages users to submit images of the prophet on May 20.
Pakistan blocked access to YouTube once before for two days in 2008 because of what it said was unIslamic content. Turkey, Thailand, Indonesia and Morocco have all blocked access to YouTube in the past for various reasons.
It remains to be seen how successful the government will be at keeping Pakistan’s nearly 20 million Internet users from accessing the blocked sites.
Other countries, such as China, permanently ban Facebook and YouTube. But citizens often have little trouble working their way around the ban using proxy servers and other means.
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