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Facebook is helping to round up blasphemers, that is to say those who insult or deny islam, and deliver them to justice in Pakistan. By engaging in illegal speech on social media they leave a trail of evidence which the government is able to request and Facebook complies with. The anti-blasphemy laws are also useful in cracking down on dissent in general as the penalty for blasphemy in Pakistan is now death.
In recent months, Pakistan's interior minister, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, has increased pressure on Facebook and Twitter to identify individuals suspected of blasphemy. On 7 July, Facebook's vice-president of public policy, Joel Kaplan, met with Khan to discuss the 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. Currently, opening a Facebook account in Pakistan requires only an email 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 individuals 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," said Pervez Hoodbhoy, a prominent academic and activist.
"Now the state is saying that we will track you down wherever you are and however you might want to hide," Hoodbhoy added. "Pakistan is fast becoming a Saudi-style fascist religious state."
The problem with engaging in potentially illegal speech on social media, of course, is that online speech leaves evidence.
(Score: 2) by MrGuy on Thursday July 27 2017, @07:27PM
This is a bad and dangerous analogy to draw.
In many ways, we do NOT want multinationals ignoring local laws. I wouldn't want a foreign company to ignore local environmental regulations at their plants, or to exempt their nationals from local criminal law while working on site in my country, or for them to ignore regulations that prohibit them from exploiting their workers.
But when it comes to the internet, things are more than a bit different. Because the internet doesn't have real physical borders (except maybe in China and North Korea).
Consider the obverse - do we really want every country to have their own laws governing the detailed working of internet services that are inherently global in scope? Should every company that wants to do business on the internet be compelled to rewrite their software to suit the whims of every country from which their services are accessible (not even with any particular tie to that country?) These problems are not theoretical - the US government is demanding soverignty over data that's never been in the US but is in the possession of a US company. Lawsuits are filed routinely against entities in foreign countries where information is published legally but can be VIEWED in countries where it's not legal (the US actually has strong laws preventing enforcement of such judgements - other countries do not).