KARACHI: The unlawful and one-sided decision by Pakistan Electronic Media and Regulatory Authority to suspend ARY News license has drawn outpouring of anger from different segments of society including politicians with an appeal to restore the channel forthwith. Alongside Twitter, hundreds of thousands of users also posted messages and voice their reservation on top social […]
ISLAMABAD: “The reopening of YouTube does not fall in our jurisdiction and there is a need to evolve an institutional mechanism to identify undesired content on the Internet,” said Anusha Rehman. The Minister for State on Information Technology and Telecom at the occasion of consultative workshop on IT Policy agreed that Pakistan will have to […]
Does social media improve communications? Has social media’s personal and professional impact been advantageous or detrimental? The predicament here is that there is no right or wrong answer. It is difficult to take a rigid stance on the benefits or disadvantages of social media because this particular argument comprises several grey areas. From a professional […]
I practice, research and teach media and can understand that populism clouds the process of democracy. I see populism in the movement of Imran Khan and that the exclusivism prevailing in the corridors of power is feeding this populism. Khan’s movement relies on projection of simplified and generalised complexities of a system that has been […]
Worrying accounts of online abuse faced by women in Pakistan have been revealed by human rights organisation and Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) think tank Bytes For All. According to them the threat against women being made prey to online stalkers and blackmailers is real and very dangerous. They have given examples ranging from online […]
ISLAMABAD: Internet abuse of women in Pakistan is triggering real-world violence against them, but major social media companies, such as Facebook and Twitter, are moving too slowly to stop it, according to internet rights group Bytes for All. Women face online threats globally, but they run a unique risk in Pakistan, where there is a […]
KARACHI: It started off as an angry post on Facebook against the ‘VIP culture’ increasingly taking space in Karachi and eventually culminated into a proper protest at Clifton’s Teen Talwar on Monday evening. A number of civil society activists, teachers and students surrounded Teen Talwar around 5pm to speak up against the “privileges allowed to […]
KARACHI: Two years, a new government and the promise of change, and at least 20 court hearings later, internet users from Pakistan are still denied access to YouTube. This restriction of access has become the symbol of a state which has increasingly become obsessed with controlling the online space in a non-transparent manner. The ban […]
In the past week, the recent scandal of leaked nude photographs of famous celebrities including Jennifer Lawrence has quite literally hogged the information space. Many of us have reacted by dismissively changing the channel or scoffing about how gossip-infused the world has become. However, we fail to recognise that the leakage of these photographs via […]
Sir: “Wisest is he who knows he does not know” – Socrates. In this one adage lies the key to understanding the increasing stupidity observed on social media. Self-proclaimed pundits on social media consider themselves to be experts on every available branch of human knowledge. They seem to have simply rejected the possibility that there […]
As of August 2014, there are 15.4 million Pakistanis on Facebook, representing approximately 8.5 per cent of the country’s total population; a virtual city set to rival Karachi in terms of sheer numbers. Without a doubt, Facebook is Pakistan’s largest social network, and — unlike when it was banned over ‘Draw Prophet Muhammad Day’ in […]
RAWALPINDI: The Pir Mehr Ali Shah Arid Agriculture University Rawalpindi has imposed a ban on the use of social media on the campus. Earlier, the students were allowed to use Facebook and Twitter through the university’s WI-Fi and servers. However, last month, the popular social networking services were blocked. The students termed the university management’s […]
“There are laws to protect the freedom of the press’s speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press” — Mark Twain. In the context of today’s online media, the above 18th century author would be bewildered to find out that everyone now holds the power of information by just […]
Karachi: The Sindh High Court issued notices to the information technology secretary, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority chairman and others on Tuesday on a petition challenging the ban on video-sharing website YouTube. Saadullah Khan and others petitioners submitted that the PTA had banned over 1,000 websites including YouTube since September 2012 because of blasphemous contents. They […]
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