Pakistan has unblocked access to video-sharing site YouTube after the move was made to crack down on sacrilegious content.
“YouTube has been unblocked, but the links to sacrilegious content would remain inaccessible in Pakistan,” Khurram Mehran from the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority told AFP.
The authority banned access to several links, including some on Wikipedia, due to what it called a growing problem of sacrilegious content. Interior minister Rehman Malik was behind the decision to lift the ban.
“We discussed this matter in the cabinet meeting today. I told my colleagues that blocking the websites was not the right thing,” Malik also said.
“I said that only particular pages that contain blasphemous material should be blocked, not the entire website.”
It is suspected the blocked material contained sketches of the Islamic religious figure Mohammed, after one Facebook user decided to embark on a “draw Mohammed day”. Any pictorial representation of Mohammed is banned in many Muslim countries.
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
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