Taimoor Raza, a 30-year-old Shiite Muslim from a “poor but literate” family, was last month sentenced to death by an anti-terrorist court in Pakistan.
His crime? Allegedly insulting the Prophet Mohammed on Facebook.
It occurred during an online debate with a man who turned out to be an undercover counterterrorism agent.
Illustration: June Hsu
His death sentence, the first to result from a social media posting, is an extreme example of the Pakistani government’s escalating battle to enforce its blasphemy laws, which criminalize insulting Islam.
Established under British colonial rule, the laws have been criticized by both religious and secular reformers, who argue that they are used to persecute minorities, settle personal scores and stifle debate.
In recent months, Pakistani Minister of the Interior Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan has increased pressure on Facebook and Twitter to identify people suspected of blasphemy.
On 7 July, Facebook vice president of public policy Joel Kaplan met with Khan to discuss the Pakistani government’s demand that Facebook either remove blasphemous content or be blocked in the country.
On Monday, Facebook confirmed that it had rejected Pakistan’s demand that new accounts be linked to a mobile phone number — a provision that would make it easier for the government to identify account holders.
Opening a Facebook account in Pakistan requires only an e-mail address, while mobile phone users must provide fingerprints to a national database.
That social media would become the means for a government crackdown on free speech is a bitter twist for platforms that claim to want to increase openness and the free flow of ideas.
The advent of social media once heralded an opening for religious debate in Pakistan.
Platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp and Viber allowed people in conservative, rural areas to engage in discussions that were once possible only for students and urban intellectuals, unconstrained by the conservative norms of their communities.
“Until recently, social media afforded a measure of privacy where you could discuss the hypocrisy of people whose behavior was loathsome, but who wore the thick garb of piety,” academic Pervez Hoodbhoy said. “Now the state is saying that we will track you down wherever you are and however you might want to hide.”
“Pakistan is fast becoming a Saudi-style fascist religious state,” Hoodbhoy added.
The problem with engaging in potentially illegal speech on social media is that online speech leaves evidence.
In 2013, the Pakistani government requested data on 210 users, Facebook’s government request report said.
By last year, government requests had risen to 2,460 accounts, with Facebook complying with about two-thirds.
Facebook declined to comment on how many of these requests involved allegations of blasphemy.
Parents are now telling their children to self-censor on Facebook, Hoodbhoy said, especially in light of the lynching in April of Mashal Khan, a university student who was accused of offending Islam.
Blogger Ahmad Waqas Goraya said that the standards for blasphemy had been lowered as the government used anti-blasphemy laws to crack down on dissent.
“What they now call blasphemy was everywhere before,” he said. “They use religion as a political tool. Almost all people detained have been critical of the state and the military.”
Goraya was one of five bloggers abducted for four weeks in January for being critical of the military establishment.
“You see what the problem [for authorities] is with social media. They cannot stop information. It levels the playing field for us,” Goraya said, adding that religious debate on Facebook had “been almost silenced.”
Pakistan is not the only country where Facebook is being asked to either censor content or be blocked. In May, Thailand threatened to block Facebook over pages that violate its lese-majeste laws, which outlaw any criticism of the Thai royal family.
Vietnam has pushed multinational corporations that do business in the country to stop advertising on Facebook and YouTube unless they remove “toxic” content, the Financial Times said.
Facebook global policy management head Monika Bickert met with the Vietnamese government in April about its concerns.
Facebook chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg has defended the company’s willingness to comply with government censorship requests by advancing “a single guiding principle.”
“We want to give the most voice to the most people,” he said.
In a 2015 Facebook post, Zuckerberg wrote: “Some people say we should ignore government orders requiring us to restrict people’s voice, even if that means the whole service would be blocked in those countries. I don’t think that’s right. If we ignored a lawful government order and then we were blocked, all of these people’s voices would be muted and whatever content the government believed was illegal would be blocked anyway.”
Goraya said that Facebook’s motives have more to do with its financial interests than in the “voice” of Pakistanis.
“At the end of the day, all they care about is their business,” he said.
By next year, whether Facebook cooperates might not matter: Pakistan is in the process of rerouting its Internet traffic through China, laying an 800km fiber optic cable from the China-Pakistan border to Rawalpindi.
Some fear the project will lead to a block of Facebook in Pakistan, similar to the one in China.
The project is expected to be finished next year.
Saudi Arabian largesse is flooding Egypt’s cultural scene, but the reception is mixed. Some welcome new “cooperation” between two regional powerhouses, while others fear a hostile takeover by Riyadh. In Cairo, historically the cultural capital of the Arab world, Egyptian Minister of Culture Nevine al-Kilany recently hosted Saudi Arabian General Entertainment Authority chairman Turki al-Sheikh. The deep-pocketed al-Sheikh has emerged as a Medici-like patron for Egypt’s cultural elite, courted by Cairo’s top talent to produce a slew of forthcoming films. A new three-way agreement between al-Sheikh, Kilany and United Media Services — a multi-media conglomerate linked to state intelligence that owns much of
The US and other countries should take concrete steps to confront the threats from Beijing to avoid war, US Representative Mario Diaz-Balart said in an interview with Voice of America on March 13. The US should use “every diplomatic economic tool at our disposal to treat China as what it is... to avoid war,” Diaz-Balart said. Giving an example of what the US could do, he said that it has to be more aggressive in its military sales to Taiwan. Actions by cross-party US lawmakers in the past few years such as meeting with Taiwanese officials in Washington and Taipei, and
The Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan has no official diplomatic allies in the EU. With the exception of the Vatican, it has no official allies in Europe at all. This does not prevent the ROC — Taiwan — from having close relations with EU member states and other European countries. The exact nature of the relationship does bear revisiting, if only to clarify what is a very complicated and sensitive idea, the details of which leave considerable room for misunderstanding, misrepresentation and disagreement. Only this week, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) received members of the European Parliament’s Delegation for Relations
Denmark’s “one China” policy more and more resembles Beijing’s “one China” principle. At least, this is how things appear. In recent interactions with the Danish state, such as applying for residency permits, a Taiwanese’s nationality would be listed as “China.” That designation occurs for a Taiwanese student coming to Denmark or a Danish citizen arriving in Denmark with, for example, their Taiwanese partner. Details of this were published on Sunday in an article in the Danish daily Berlingske written by Alexander Sjoberg and Tobias Reinwald. The pretext for this new practice is that Denmark does not recognize Taiwan as a state under