Journalists say the atmosphere for reporting was becoming more hostile. KARACHI: Senior journalists and editors hailing from different newspapers of KP, Balochistan and Sindh on Saturday talked about the new challenges facing their profession in recent years. Gathering for a round table meeting on Reporting Conflict at the Avari Hotel, journalists said that they worried […]
The Pakistan government’s war against the internet resulted in the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) blocking a host of torrent websites that allow people to download music, movies and TV shows. On the face of it, the justification for this ban is that these websites allow users to circumvent copyright laws and steal intellectual property. But […]
Shafiq Solangi Gone are the days when we use to wait for a morning paper to know about the national and international affairs—because of social media we get the information as it happens. Today, in this advance world of information technology we are very much interconnected with the world around. Text messages, emails, facebook, twitter, […]
LAHORE: Use of social media has been rapidly growing in Pakistan which is useful in awareness creation among the public but also creating problems due to misuse of it. The trend of reading books has been declining with growing use of Facebook among the youth while all the political and religious parties are using the […]
THE Australian Ambassador for Counter-Terrorism, Bill Paterson, has claimed that terror outfits that have embraced the rise of technology, the Internet in particular, to spread their messages and attract followers, are using Facebook to recruit loners from western nations like Australia to their cause. He said social media has also encouraged the rise of home-grown […]
NO doubt, it is an era of freedom of expression, and denying access to social networking websites sparks criticism by advocates of freedom of information and expression, as was the case with the blocking of Twitter by the ministry of information technology on legitimate concerns. Pakistan has thoughtlessly been following western values and cultures and, […]
ACCORDING to media reports, authorities in Pakistan shut down social networking website Twitter for several hours after government found blasphemous material on the site. Only a year ago, another social networking website Facebook received same treatment in several countries. It is a fact that despite their growing popularity, social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter and […]
By Qaiser Zulfiqar ISLAMABAD: A day after the authorities briefly banned access to microblogging website Twitter due to ‘blasphemous’ material, the city capital police on the orders of a city court on Monday registered a case against social networking giant Facebook. Margalla police station registered a First Information Report (FIR) against Facebook and three other […]
WILL Pakistan ever learn that bans are counterproductive and only serve to make a laughing stock out of us? More importantly, will our decision-makers ever realise that it is futile to try and police the world? Apparently not. A couple of years ago, the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority, on the directives of the Lahore High Court, […]
That the stock market moves in mysterious ways was shown again on May 18 as the initial public offering (IPO) by Facebook was nowhere near as successful as most people had expected. The share price for the social networking behemoth barely budged from its opening price of $38, ending up just a few pennies above […]
Karachi: The abrupt blocking and subsequent unblocking of the popular social media site Twitter on Sunday was a perfect reflection of the government’s handling of many other key issues: a bumbling, knee-jerk reaction soon reduced to a comedy of errors. The move to block the website and the defiant reaction to the ban also revealed […]
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan restored access to Twitter after briefly blocking the microblog over “blasphemous” posts about a Facebook competition involving caricatures of Prophet Mohammed. The website was blocked Sunday by the telecoms authority on the orders of the IT ministry amid accusations it refused to remove messages about the Facebook contest. But the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority […]
By Afiya Shehrbano Zia The writer is an independent researcher who has also written for The News, Dawn, The Friday Times and EPW. She is also a member of the Women’s Action Forum It’s an accurate observation by Mazhar Abbas (who wrote on these pages some days ago), that the only force that can rightfully […]
AMAR GURIRO As a relative of a Bhoja Air crash victim mourns, television reporters thrust their mikes in his face to get some ‘sensational sobs’. KARACHI – While the electronic media broadcasted special programmes on the tragic Bhoja Air crash, criticising the airline administration, government authorities and other airliner companies for the second day running, […]
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