Pakistan has crossed a threshold that few democracies have. What began as ad hoc 'security' blackouts during the February 2024 general elections has hardened into a permanent architecture of digital control — one that combines indefinite platform blocks, criminalised speech, and rolling mobile internet suspensions concentrated in the country's most marginalised regions. For a 240-million-person economy whose government has spent the last decade marketing itself as a digital-services hub, this is a strategic self-injury.
A 15-Month X Block With No Legal Basis
The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) ordered the throttling and then full block of X (then Twitter) on 17 February 2024, three days after Pakistan's general election and after senior officials publicly alleged irregularities in the vote count. More than 15 months later, the platform remains inaccessible without a VPN. The Interior Ministry has cited 'national security' in submissions to the Islamabad High Court, but no formal, time-bound order under Pakistan's own Telecommunications (Re-organisation) Act has ever been produced. The Sindh High Court declared the block illegal in April 2024; the platform stayed dark anyway.
This is not edge-case censorship. X is the primary venue where Pakistani journalists, lawyers, dissident politicians, and members of the diaspora coordinate. Replacing 'judicial review' with 'indefinite executive blocking' is precisely the move the European Court of Human Rights warned against in Ahmet Yıldırım v. Turkey (2012) — the foundational ruling that wholesale platform blocks fail the proportionality test under any rights-respecting framework.
PECA 2025: Criminalising 'False Information'
In January 2025, the President signed the Prevention of Electronic Crimes (Amendment) Act, inserting a new Section 26A that punishes dissemination of 'false or fake information' likely to cause 'fear, panic, disorder or unrest' with up to three years' imprisonment and a fine of up to PKR 2 million. The Act also created a new Social Media Protection and Regulatory Authority with sweeping powers to order takedowns and block accounts without judicial pre-authorisation.
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists, and digital rights group Bolo Bhi have all challenged the amendment as facially overbroad. The definitional problem is fundamental: 'false information' is not a category courts can administer without collapsing into viewpoint discrimination. The UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression has consistently held — most recently in the 2023 report A/HRC/53/25 — that criminal sanctions for 'disinformation' fail the necessity test under Article 19(3) of the ICCPR, to which Pakistan is a party.
Balochistan: The Permanent Blackout
The mobile data suspensions in Balochistan — particularly in Gwadar, Mastung, Kech and along the Makran coast — are now measured in months, not hours. Access Now's #KeepItOn coalition has flagged Pakistan as one of the world's most persistent shutdown offenders for three years running; its 2024 annual report ranked Pakistan among the top jurisdictions globally for documented internet shutdowns.
The official justification is counter-insurgency. The actual effect is to disconnect a province of roughly 15 million people from banking apps, ride-hailing, e-learning platforms, telemedicine and the cash-transfer systems that BISP (Benazir Income Support Programme) beneficiaries depend on. The Gwadar port — the showcase project of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor — is now serviced by a workforce that cannot reliably use mobile money.
The Economic Bill Is Already Visible
- The Pakistan Software Houses Association (P@SHA) warned in 2024 that the X block alone was costing the IT export sector tens of millions of dollars in lost client engagement and freelance income, with Karachi-based developers losing platform access to international clients.
- Top10VPN's annual cost-of-shutdowns tracker has repeatedly placed Pakistan among the most economically damaged jurisdictions globally — the 2024 estimate put direct losses from Pakistan's X block alone at over $1.6 billion.
- Freelance platforms have downgraded Pakistani worker reliability scores during shutdown windows, with measurable spillover to the country's roughly $400 million annual freelance export economy.
The Proportionality Question
No serious analyst disputes that Pakistan faces real security challenges — the Balochistan Liberation Army has carried out lethal attacks, and the TTP insurgency in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is genuine. The question is whether shutting down an entire province's mobile data, criminalising 'false information' nationally, and blocking a major platform indefinitely actually delivers security gains proportionate to the costs.
The evidence is that it does not. A growing body of empirical work — including Jan Rydzak's 2019 study on Indian shutdowns and subsequent peer-reviewed replications — finds that internet blackouts correlate with more, not less, contentious mobilisation, because they push communication into less accountable channels and remove the moderating effect of public visibility.
Pakistan does not have a disinformation problem that justifies criminal sanction. It has a trust problem with its own population, and shutdowns deepen it.
What a Proportionate Approach Looks Like
A pro-innovation, rights-respecting alternative is not exotic. It looks like: time-bound, geographically narrow shutdown orders subject to judicial pre-authorisation; a sunset clause and mandatory parliamentary review for any platform block exceeding 72 hours; replacement of PECA's Section 26A with a narrower offence focused on verifiable incitement to imminent violence; and a transparency duty on the PTA to publish all blocking orders in machine-readable form, as Brazil's Marco Civil requires.
Pakistan's digital economy — fintech, freelancing, and the export-services sector that Islamabad explicitly courts — cannot coexist indefinitely with a regulator that treats the open internet as a switch to flip. The country is at a fork: it can be a regional hub for digital services, or it can be a case study in shutdowns. It cannot be both.