Islamabad   –     Facebook in its latest report confirms Pakistan Telecommunication Authority’s (PTA) efforts to protect social media and internet users from harmful content available online.

The PTA requests for content restriction were related to blasphemy, indecent, pornography, defamatory, impersonation, and anti-state content etc. PTA has been mandated to block/remove such unlawful content hosted on the internet under Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (PECA 2016). Since these requests were also in accordance with Facebook’s community standards hence they were accepted by Facebook.

As far as fake news is concerned, both PTA and Facebook recognized that spread of fake news is a challenging and sensitive issue. PTA is proactively working to discourage fake news. Facebook is also working in various ways to reduce the spread of fake news including removing anonymous accounts and pages that spread fake news or propaganda.