X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, remains inaccessible across Pakistan for the second week. The X services were disrupted on Saturday, February 17 — about eight days after the elections — and have since been unavailable in the country.
There has been no official statement regarding the unexplained ban on X from the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) so far, the country’s telecom regulator. The silence has cast a pall of concern and fear from social media users as to whether the platform will be restored at all.
Several digital rights activists, journalists, and free speech advocates have raised concerns over the prolonged X ban in Pakistan. X, though not as popular as other leading apps such as Facebook and Instagram, is a major platform for political discourse in the country. First the disruptions and then complete ban on the platform following the February 8 polls have put local authorities under intense regulatory scrutiny around the world.
Last week, the Sindh High Court (SHC) heard three petitions filed against social media disruptions, including the suspension of X. The court demanded an explanation from the PTA while reprimanding the authorities concerned for making a “spectacle” of themselves by causing internet disruptions.
The SHC, expressing displeasure at the suspension of mobile internet services on the polling day, remarked that even the international media covered how elections were held in the country (alluding to the lack of transparency). Users are mostly using VPNs (virtual private networks) to access the platform for information, which according to reports, are being restricted, too.
NetBlocks, an organisation that monitors internet outages worldwide, registered several instances of connectivity blackouts before and during the elections in Pakistan. The surreptitious outages, which heavily impacted the election campaigning of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) — especially their virtual rally and fundraising telethon — and other independent candidates, including Jibran Nasir, turned frequent in the in run-up to the elections.
Then information minister, instead of giving a concrete reasoning for increased internet disruptions, vaguely ascribed them to “upgradation” of a “system”, saying there could be similar outages in following days. Then, before the elections, then caretaker government officials and the PTA assured the citizens that there would be no internet shutdown, albeit the government not ruling it out in the case of a request from a district or province facing security threats. However, mobile internet services were completely blocked on the polling day.
