Pakistani government officials on Saturday confirmed to AFP they had blocked access to Wikipedia inside the country following days of warnings over “blasphemous content” going unheeded. Malahat Obaid, a spokesman for the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, told AFP the ubiquitous online encyclopedia had been cut off after its US-based administrators “failed to respond to our repeated correspondence over removal of the blasphemous content and meet the deadline.”
Thing is the Pakistani government never actually publicly specified what the “blasphemous content” was and it’s hard to see this as anything other than a pretext to block far more than just visual depictions of the Prophet Mohammed or an outline of Salman Rushdie’s the Satanic Verses.
When it comes down to it, preventing their people from reading Wikipedia articles about 1971 Bangladeshi war of independence from Pakistan, or the 2007 assassination of Benazir Bhutto, or the US Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama Bin Laden or other shit that makes the Pakistani state – and not Islam – look bad really screams out like an admission of failure. Why bother with a competing vision when just shutting off knowledge sourced from the outside world will do the job faster?
The fanboys are going to immediately cry “National Zero R hypocrites” because of Hunter Biden’s laptop, ivermectin, Dominion voting machines, or whatever other horseshit stories they think were “censored” by Big Tech and the mainstream media over the last few years. No need to settle for simply saying that the actions of the sovereign state with those of private enterprise here in the US are two different things. It’s not like they listened the last however many fucking times it’s been explained to them, so let’s just go ahead and pretend they exist on the same plane:
Sometimes certain public and private authorities block information that can be disruptive to the normal functions of a country’s politics and economy, not to mention put groups and individuals in harm’s way. Whether it was the morally “right” thing to do is a subjective call, and human beings are susceptible to making bad calls (or worse, self-interested ones). Outsider observers judging those calls are going to do so subjectively as well. However the ivermectin hoax got people killed. In two years of bullshit over Hunter Biden’s laptop the most “incriminating” document found on it was a rental application that some right winger misread leading Breitbart and the Daily Wire to retract their stories on it. A former executive at Dominion found strong evidence the Trump 2020 campaign knew their conspiracy theories were false. Those are empirical facts, ones not up for debate, that informed the decisions to throttle their spread and mitigate harm they could cause.
Pakistan and other authoritarian governments blocking access to outside sources are working in the other direction. It’s the real news and information from the outside world that presents a threat to their regimes. China blocks Twitter to hide their abuses in Xinjiang, Russia shutters websites that report on war casualties in Ukraine, Ron DeSantis bans an AP African American studies course because it might cause students to have sympathy for Black victims of systemic racism, and so on and so forth. That’s what sets “censorship” apart from actual censorship.
And no, sure bring up the Newsmax-DirecTV shit if you want, MAGA trolls. Just be prepared to explain how Wikipedia demanded Pakistan pay them $20 million a year to remain accessible there.