By DPA,
Islamabad : Pakistan has blocked the video-sharing website YouTube because of its “growing sacrilegious contents”, officials said Thursday.
The ban came hours after the government temporarily blocked the social networking website Facebook, where a group announced an online competition for cartoons of Prophet Mohammed to be held Thursday.
A statement from the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) said that the YouTube and Facebook websites were blocked after the government failed to convince them to remove “derogatory material”.
“PTA has so far blocked more than 450 links on internet containing derogatory material,” PTA spokesman Khurram Mehran said, adding that some “blasphemous cartoons were being transferred from the Facebook to YouTube”.
Access to the photo-sharing site Flickr and online encyclopedia Wikipedia was also restricted. Internet browsing on cellphones was also shut down.
Facebook estimates its number of users in Pakistan at 2.4 million.
The campaign titled “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” appeared to have been launched by Seattle-based cartoonist Molly Norris in solidarity with the producers of the television show South Park, which drew criticism from Muslims for featuring the prophet.
Norris drew a cartoon depicting various household objects claiming to be likenesses of Mohammed, which she claimed was to support the South Park’s creators’ fight against censorship.
But she says on her website that she had nothing to do with the Facebook initiative.
“I did NOT ‘declare’ May 20 to be Everybody Draw Mohammed Day,” a statement on her webpage said. “I apologise to people of Muslim faith and ask that this ‘day’ be called off,” it added.
Norris’ Facebook profile showed her to have joined a group called Against Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.
The initiative turned into an online movement within days, as dozens of Facebook users started their own pages. The original group attracted tens of thousands of fans, according to a report by the US newspaper Seattle Times.
Most Muslims consider the depiction of the Prophet to be blasphemous. Publication of cartoons of Mohammed in Danish newspapers in 2005 and 2006 sparked violent protests in Muslim countries that left around 500 dead, five of them in Pakistan.
Demonstrations have also been held in Pakistan in protest at the initiative. Activists from an alliance of religious parties planned a protest rally in Islamabad late Thursday.