Pakistan yesterday temporarily banned Twitter in the region. The move was in response to a competition on Facebook called Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, now in its third year. The competition encourages entrants to draw caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed, and Pakistan authorities actually used censorship to quell the spread of images, unlike South African authorities who dealt with a similar “caricature” incident on Friday.

Twitter services were restored late in the evening Sunday, around 22h00 Pakistan time.

There was no explanation or official statement, but rights campaigners saw the move as a warning to the media and public that officials don’t approve of controversial content being circulated on social networks.

The shutdowns began around midday Sunday, in a rolling ban that almost immediately brought a huge public outcry on other social media.

Local Pakistani media quoted a government spokesman saying that the government had been in talks with Twitter to remove “objectionable” material, but nothing happened.

Mohammad Yaseen, chairman of the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority:

The material was promoting a competition on Facebook to post images of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad.

He said that Facebook had agreed to allay the concerns of the Pakistani government.

The New York Times has more:

It remained unclear — and unlikely — that Twitter had agreed to the demands of the Pakistani government before access was restored, at roughly 10 p.m. Sunday.

Fizza Batool Gilani, the daughter of Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, announced on Twitter around then that Mr. Gilani had ordered the restoration. Blasphemy is an issue that stirs sentiment easily in Pakistan. Blasphemy allegations have often resulted in violent riots, and religious minorities in Pakistan have long maintained that the country’s blasphemy laws are used to settle personal scores.

Facebook was banned for two weeks in 2010 after protests erupted in the country over a similar cartoon contest on Facebook to draw the Prophet Muhammad. After a high court ordered the government to ban Facebook, the government was quick to ban YouTube and hundreds of other Web sites and services.

Speculation that the government intended to suspend Facebook and Twitter again had been swirling around for the past couple of days.

However, this time around there have been no major public protests over the contest that Pakistani officials have expressed concerns about.

The ban caught Twitter users by surprise.

“I never heard of any caricatures on Twitter,” said Arif Rafiq, an adjunct scholar at Middle East Institute and a commentator on Pakistani politics, who has a Twitter following of more than 10,000 users. “Now this ban will be promoting whatever caricatures were posted on it.”

Responding to a question last night, Rehman Malik, the country’s interior minister, had denied that a ban on social networking sites was planned.

“The government of Pakistan’s ban on Twitter is ill-advised, counterproductive and will ultimately prove to be futile as all such attempts at censorship have proved to be,” said Ali Dayan Hasan, Pakistan director at Human Rights Watch, in a press statement. “The right to free speech is nonnegotiable, and if Pakistan is the rights-respecting democracy it claims to be, this ban must be lifted forthwith. Free speech can and should only be countered with free speech.”

Critics say this was an attack on free speech, however Twitter remains a place inside and outside Pakistan where opposition thoughts to Pakistan’s authorities are often expressed.

While we’re on the subject of caricatures, you should have a look at Zapiro’s response to the President Jacob Zuma artwork.

[Source: NYTimes]