Pakistani authorities blocked access to Twitter on Sunday. The authorities said the website refused to have posts removed that promoted a competition on Facebook that involved caricatures of Mohammed.
A spokesman from the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority said that Twitter was banned by the order of the Ministry of Information Technology. The spokesman said the website contained blasphemous material. He said that the incident involved both Twitter and Facebook and the PTA had negotiated with both parties.
Facebook agreed to remove the content in question, but Twitter had not responded to their requests and because of that Twitter had been blocked and Facebook was still open for access in the country.
Those cartoons caused al-Qaeda to carry out a suicide bombing in from of the Islamabad Danish embassy that took the lives of eight people. In May of 2010, Facebook was blocked by a Pakistan court because of a competition that was similar to the recent one and organized by a Facebook user who remained anonymous.
The competition caused the social media site to be banned for close to two weeks in Pakistan, following a petition by a number of Islamic lawyers in the country. YouTube was also banned in the country for over a week and there was restricted access to a number of other sites for the growing amount of sacrilegious content on the sites.
