On May 22, 2026, Pakistan's nationwide block of X — the platform formerly known as Twitter — passes its 27th month, making it one of the longest sustained restrictions on a major social network anywhere outside China, Iran, and North Korea. The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) imposed the block on February 17, 2024, citing 'national security' concerns days after the contested general elections that month. Two years on, despite an Islamabad High Court that has repeatedly pressed the government to justify the order, and a Sindh High Court ruling in April 2024 directing that it be lifted, X remains inaccessible without a VPN to ordinary Pakistanis. What began as an emergency measure has hardened into de facto policy — and in doing so has hollowed out the very framework of intermediary liability that Pakistan's own laws claim to operate under.
An intermediary liability regime that collapsed into a kill switch
On paper, Pakistan has a notice-and-takedown system. Section 37 of the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act, 2016 (PECA) empowers the PTA to remove or block 'unlawful' online content; the Removal and Blocking of Unlawful Online Content (Procedure, Oversight and Safeguards) Rules, 2021 require platforms to designate Pakistan-based grievance officers and to comply with specific takedown orders within stipulated deadlines. The architecture, however flawed, was supposed to route disputes through identified categories of content — defamation, incitement, contempt of religion — rather than entire platforms.
The X block bypasses every step of that supposed pipeline. There is no published takedown request, no specific class of content identified, no judicial sign-off. The block is administered as if X itself were the unlawful object. That is not intermediary liability; it is the sovereign expulsion of an entire platform from the public sphere.
Three court interventions — and a state that ignored them
The legal record since 2024 is striking. The Sindh High Court ordered the PTA to restore X access in April 2024, finding that the executive had not produced a lawful basis under PECA. The Islamabad High Court took up parallel petitions filed by journalists, lawyers, and the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, repeatedly pressing the Ministry of Interior to disclose the legal authority underlying the directive. The Ministry's eventual written reply — that the block had been ordered to protect 'national security' — was met with judicial scepticism but, critically, no enforcement teeth.
This is a structural problem familiar across the region: when blocking decisions are taken by the executive without statutory transparency, courts can question them but rarely reverse them in practice. Pakistan's Constitution (Article 19) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Pakistan ratified in 2010, both require restrictions on speech to be necessary, proportionate, and provided by law. A two-year, judicially-contested block of an entire platform satisfies none of the three tests.
Why blanket platform bans break the model
Proportionate intermediary liability rests on a tiered architecture that better-functioning regimes have converged on, even if imperfectly:
- Notice: a specific complainant identifies specific content.
- Review: the platform assesses it against its terms and applicable law.
- Action: targeted removal, geo-restriction, labelling, or refusal — not whole-platform punishment.
- Oversight: independent judicial review of contested decisions, with reasons published.
The EU's Digital Services Act, India's Supreme Court ruling in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2015) — which struck down the vague Section 66A of the IT Act — and the U.S. Section 230 framework all share a premise: hold platforms accountable for specific failures, not for existing. Pakistan's two-year block of X is the inverse. It treats intermediary liability as an on/off switch operated by the executive, not a graduated set of remedies enforced through law.
The cost — economic and democratic
The damage is not theoretical. Pakistan's IT and IT-enabled services exports — one of the few growth segments in a strained economy — depend on stable, predictable global connectivity. The Pakistan Software Houses Association (P@SHA) has repeatedly warned that platform blocks and the parallel VPN registration push are scaring off foreign clients and pushing freelancers to register businesses abroad. Top10VPN's annual Cost of Internet Shutdowns tracker has flagged Pakistan as one of the world's most expensive blocking regimes in dollar terms in each year since the X ban began, with reported impact running into the high hundreds of millions.
The democratic cost is sharper. Senior politicians from every major party — including ministers in the government that ordered the block — have continued posting on X via VPN, while ordinary citizens face the friction. Journalists rely on the platform for source contact and breaking news distribution; civil society organisations use it to coordinate. A block that the powerful can route around and the public cannot is precisely the kind of asymmetric restriction that erodes legitimacy faster than the harm it claims to address.
What a proportionate reset looks like
Pakistan is not without legitimate concerns about online harm; targeted content takedowns under judicial oversight are a defensible tool. But the cure for content-specific problems is content-specific enforcement, not platform-wide expulsion. A credible reset would lift the X block in line with the courts' direction, publish all PTA blocking orders with reasons and statutory citations, and require time-limited renewal of any restriction with judicial review — modelled on the safeguards India's Supreme Court laid down in Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India (2020). It would also bring the 2021 Rules into compliance with ICCPR Article 19's proportionality test, something Pakistan's own Constitution already demands.
The longer the block runs, the more it normalises a model in which intermediary liability means whatever the executive says it means on a given Tuesday. That is a precedent neither Pakistan's digital economy nor its democracy can afford.