Islamabad
While blanket ban on YouTube was lifted, objectionable links on the site will remain blocked, Pakistan telecommunication authority spokesman Khurram Mehran said
Pakistan has partially unblocked the popular video sharing websites YouTube, but links to " sacrilegious or profane material" will remain restricted, a top government official said on Thursday.
Pakistan blocked YouTube last week in a bid to contain content deemed blashemous, a day after it cut off access to social networking sites Facebook indefinitely because of an online competition to draw the Prophet Mohammad.
" We have lifted the ban on only that part which is not displaying any sacrilegious of profane material," Naguibullah Malik, secretary of information technology and telecom, said. But while many of the videos connected with the competition were blocked, others remained accessible in Pakistan on Thursday morning. Most Muslims consider any representation of the Prophet Mohammed to be blashemous.
Malik said his ministry had acted on its own in blocking YouTube, but that Facebook was banned on the orders of a court. " We had banned one URL of the Facebook but the high court ordered the banning of the entire Facebook," he said.
The next hearing on the case will be May 31. The publication of cartoons of the Prophet in Danish newspapers in 2005 sparked deadly protests in Muslims countries. About 50 people were killed during violent protests in Muslim countries in 2006, five of them in Pakistan.
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70% for permanent ban: Poll
A poll has revealed that 70% people in Pakistan want a permanent ban on the social networking website Facebook, while another 15% support the Lahore high court's order to ban the website till May 31
Acccording to the ProPakistani.pk poll, the participants expressed sheer anger on Facebook for displaying blasphemous drawings of Prophet Muhammad. Eight per cent Participants said that a single URL ban was enough, while the remaining seven per cent felt they did not want ban on Facebook at all.
Jabran Rafique, a student, said thousand of people had complained to Facebook to remove the blasphemous content but no action was taken
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