In recent news ‘Twitter has bowed down’ to the demands of the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) to block Blasphemous Content. The whole world is against any form of censorship, people believe that information of any nature should not be withheld. While I do agree that censorship is prevalent in Pakistan, as the citizens have been deprived of YouTube since 2012 but this kind of censorship; in which only a mere number of tweets have been banned; should not be made a fuss about.

In my personal opinion ‘Freedom of Speech’ should have certain limits. If Freedom of Speech is used to hurt people’s sentiments then it should be, by all means, avoided. There is no point if ‘Freedom of Speech’ creates conflicts. If you still disagree with what I say then the use of other derogatory terms should be allowed our daily conversations and it should not be taken as an offense. But unfortunately the world doesn’t work this way.

Pakistani people and its government had every right to protest against this, as all they did was is that they asked twitter to block some tweets, not the whole Twitter. A similar request was also sent to YouTube but they did not comply since they don’t have Country Specific Censorship Policy. I completely respect this, as no one should operate beyond their boundaries. But YouTube did recently proposed that they will give Pakistan a separate domain like ‘www.youtube.com.pk’ so that they can block the content which they find offensive.

Coming back to the point EFF took an aggressive stance on all of this and they said that:

‘Supporters of Twitter’s position might also argue that the country-by-country censorship is easy to circumvent; all you need to do is change your account’s location settings. This is true and it’s one of the nice things about the Internet. But the argument misses the point: Censorship is censorship, even if it is weak or easy to get around. No one will ever defend Twitter as the “weak censorship wing of the Free Speech Party.” And that includes EFF.’

I agree with what EFF has to say but like I have mentioned before that there should be some sort of scale which qualifies to be termed as Censorship. I will stick with my opinion i.e. avoid freedom of speech if it creates conflicts, we already have enough of them and we don’t need any more. Leave your comments below and let me know what you think about this and as for the “Censorship” you can get a VPN to get through or change your location from Pakistan to anywhere else in the world, it’s that simple you don’t need to make a fuss about it. 😉