Twitter has restricted the official handle of the Pakistan Government in certain parts of the country, thinking that certain areas fall within India’s jurisdiction. As much as it is an egg on the face moment for Twitter, it seems to be a bigger fiasco for the central Government of Pakistan
Twitter users in our neighbour to the west woke up to a nasty surprise when they saw that they couldn’t see the tweets from the official handle of the Pakistani Government. Users in Gilgit Baltistan in particular were shown a message that they couldn’t access tweets or any post from the handle “@GovtogPakistan” because of a legal deman in India.
For those unaware, Gilgit Baltistan is a disputed area in Kashmir that Pakistan adamantly and wrongly claims to be its own.
The news of Gilgit Baltistan’s “relocation” or rather “reabsorption” in to India was first reported in an article by Dawn. The incident came to light when Yasir Hussain, a resident of the Rahimabad area of Gilgit, tweeted, “I am in Gilgit-Baltistan and Twitter can’t show tweets from [the] Government of Pakistan, saying that account has been withheld in India in response to a legal demand! Hello Twitter Support, I’m in Pakistan, why can’t I see tweets from various accounts I follow including the one mentioned?”
Hussain, in his conversation with Dawn, revealed that he encountered an issue when attempting to assign a location to his tweets. He discovered that he was mistakenly labeled as being in India’s Jammu and Kashmir region. Expressing concern, Hussain urged Pakistani officials to address the situation seriously. Additionally, he raised the possibility that India might have exerted some influence on Twitter to alter the geo-tagging of the region. Some provincial leaders also claimed the same.
Following this, Karim Shah Nizari, a Twitter user residing in Pakistan-administered Gilgit-Baltistan, expressed his frustration and said that he could not add the location he wanted. “The only option we are getting is Jammu and Kashmir,” he told Dawn.
However, officials in Pakistan were quick to dismiss this claim. They put out a statement, which said that the claims circulating in the media are “baseless”. “There are no restrictions on the freedom of the internet, media and expression in the entire Gilgit Baltistan,” they said.
