The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has banned blogging platform WordPress.com due to “security reasons”. WordPress becomes the second major site to be banned in Pakistan after Youtube which was banned in 2012 after an Anti-Islam movie trailer appeared on the site.
WordPress has a huge user base in Pakistan and is used as a medium that gives voice to bloggers and citizen/new media journalists to have their say online. The ban however doesnt seem to apply to self-hosted websites powered by WordPress but users cant access wordpress.com or sites hosted on it. PTA has a history of blocking any website that it deems “threat” to society with threats aganist Twitter, Facebook and Google as a whole.
On visiting a site, the following message appears for visitors within Pakistan.
