Pakistan has threatened to ban Wikipedia if it does not remove “blasphemous content” from its website by Friday, the latest censorship warning in the deeply conservative country.
Social media giants Facebook and YouTube have been blocked in the past over content deemed blasphemous, a hugely sensitive issue in Muslim-majority Pakistan.
The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) on Wednesday said the website had until late Friday to heed the warning, without elaborating on the content in question.
In the meantime, Wikipedia would be “degraded”, disrupting and slowing access to the free online encyclopedia, which gets billions of views each month.
“Given the intentional failure on part of the platform to comply with the directions of PTA, the services of Wikipedia have been degraded for 48 hours with the direction to block/remove the reported contents,” the notice said.
“In case of non-compliance by Wikipedia the platform will be blocked within Pakistan.”
