The fate of the government’s social media regulations hangs in the balance. The second version of the rules – titled Removal and Blocking of Unlawful Online Content (Procedure, Oversight and Safeguards) Rules, 2020 – were released in November 2020 and almost immediately ran into opposition from civil society and social media companies, the latter under the banner of Asia Internet Coalition (AIC).
The civil society argued that the rules infringed on freedom of expression and the tech firms’ contention was they weren’t properly consulted when those rules were being framed. The AIC members (Facebook, Twitter, and Google, among others) took their grievances directly to the PM by writing ominous letters. And the local civil society, which comprised, among others, a leading journalist body and a political party, challenged the rules in the Islamabad High Court.
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