ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Telecommunication Authority said on Tuesday it had banned the Singaporean live-streaming app Bigo over “immoral, obscene and vulgar content” and issued a “final warning” to Chinese video sharing platform Tiktok for "similar" reasons.
Earlier this month, PTA banned the hugely popular online game, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, or PUBG, saying it was addictive, a waste of players’ time and was having an adverse effect on the mental and physical health of the country’s youth.
A view of Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) building in Islamabad, Pakistan, January 22, 2020. (AN photo)
PUBG, made by South Korean firm Bluehole Inc, is a survival-themed battle game that drops dozens of online players on an island to try and eliminate each other. It was launched in 2017 and has a huge global following.
“Number of complaints had been received from different segments of the society against immoral, obscene and vulgar content on social media applications particularly TikTok and Bigo, and their extremely negative effects on the society in general and youth in particular,” PTA said in a statement.
The regulator said it had issued warnings to the social media companies to moderate their content and bring it in line with Pakistani laws, but was not satisfied with the “response.”
Therefore, the regulator said, it had “decided to immediately block Bigo and issue final warning to TikTok to put in place a comprehensive mechanism to control obscenity, vulgarity and immorality through its social media application.”
Science and technology minister Fawad Chaudhry has said he is against such bans and they were “killing the tech industry” in Pakistan.
On July 14, a petition was filed in the Lahore High Court, the highest court in Pakistan’s most populous province of Punjab, seeking a ban on Tiktok “for the sake of securing wellbeing of the people of Pakistan.” The court has yet to accept the plea and begin hearing the case.
