By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: Twitter has blocked access to the official account of the government of Pakistan in the country’s scenic northern region of Gilgit-Baltistan and changed its location to parts of Indian-occupied Kashmir, Dawn newspaper reported on Sunday.
The issue came to light after Twitter users in Gilgit-Baltistan complained they were unable to access the account @GovtofPakistan from the region and saw a message stating the “account has been withheld in India in response to a legal demand”.
The account has been banned in India since March 2023. In 2022, it was withheld twice over “legal complaints”.
Gilgit Baltistan, sometimes referred to as the land of glaciers, fought pro-India forces and opted to join Pakistan in 1948. The region, which borders Afghanistan and China, is the gateway of the $65 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) infrastructure plan.
Twitter users also reported that when they turned on the location feature on the app, tweets sent from the region were marked as originating from Indian-occupied Kashmir.
Yasir Hussain, a resident of Rahimabad area of Gilgit, told Dawn that he found this “very disturbing” and said officials in Pakistan should take “serious cognisance” of this matter as India “might have influenced Twitter to change GB’s geo-tagging”.
Another user, Karim Shah Nizari, said he could not add Pakistan’s location to his tweets. “The only option we are getting is Jammu and Kashmir,” he said.
Nizari said all official Twitter accounts of the Pakistani government that are inaccessible in Indian-occupied Kashmir are also not working in Gilgit-Baltistan.
Twitter did not respond to Dawn’s request for comment. The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority also did not reply to queries.
India is known to wield “considerable influence” over the social media platform and even coerced it to abide by its local laws in the past.
In September 2022, Twitter’s former security chief told the US Congress that the company knowingly allowed India to add agents to the company roster, potentially giving it access to sensitive data about users.
Last June senior Twitter officials said India regularly issued requests to remove certain posts and accounts and also threatened legal repercussions in cases of non-compliance.
“India is one of the countries which had many requests around …. around particular journalists which were critical of the government,” they said.
Twitter has also sued the Indian government in the past over some orders to block tweets and accounts alleging that New Delhi had abused its power by ordering it to arbitrarily and disproportionately remove several tweets from its platform.
After Twitter delayed compliance with India’s new IT regulations, a special unit of the Delhi Police made surprise visits to two of Twitter’s offices in India in 2021.
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