Aamna Aamna 
Social media platforms experience major disruptions in Pakistan as the government implements measures to control political protests.
Social media platforms and communications services are being heavily disrupted in Pakistan as the authorities take action to counter political protests. The outages involving WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook were timed with the PTI party’s planned march to Islamabad. These applications have been reported to be experiencing issues by Downdetector, a service monitoring platform, and users ‘Experience nationwide slowdowns and problems accessing different social media and other platforms.
People in major cities are becoming increasingly impatient with the disruption of their lives by these events. Karachi people note that they have extreme issues sharing media files through WhatsApp, while working-class people in Islamabad have problems with their daily work schedules. This has been emphatically defined by the current slowdown has impacted particularly those who rely on these technologies for work and education establishing social media as a necessity of modern Pakistani society.
Some of the disruptions have raised issues on issues to do with digital rights and freedom of speech. A resident of Lahore also mentioned the contradiction saying that authorities who govern are also the ones largely dependent on such applications. The situation has engendered more debates on the appropriate tension between security concerns and citizens’ right access to information.
It has included the mobilization of thousands of police and paramilitary forces in and around the capital Islamabad as a precaution. Despite the fact that officials have not offered an explanation for the disruption of social media, they have said they will limit internet access in some regions for security purposes. These measures seem to the part of a larger strategy of targeting PTI’s efforts to bring out its supporters for the public demonstrations.
The current government led by Shehbaz Sharif is still enforcing security measures after the PTI’s Imran Khan urged his supporters to march to Islamabad. The ongoing disruptions are more serious than the previous ones and reveal growth in the government’s tendency to suppress political unrest, which raises questions about digital rights in Pakistan.
