Pakistan restricted yet another social media platform over the weekend.
WhatsApp is the new target of government censorship after X, Facebook, Instagram, and, most recently, Bluesky were blocked across the country.
The internet watchdog NetBlocks reported the outage on Saturday, November 23, 2024 (see tweet below).
"The measure comes as authorities tighten security ahead of protests planned by opposition party PTI calling for the release of former PM Imran Khan," noted the experts.
⚠️ Confirmed: Live metrics show WhatsApp backends have been restricted in #Pakistan corroborating reports of media sharing issues; the measure comes as authorities tighten security ahead of protests planned by opposition party PTI calling for the release of former PM Imran Khan pic.twitter.com/aHYDLN934MNovember 23, 2024
Censorship levels in Pakistan have increased significantly in 2024.
Today's most popular social media platforms first went dark in January, a month away from general elections, as Khan's party, PTI, launched its online election fundraising telethon.
Authorities enforced a temporary internet shutdown on February 8, election day. X was then restricted on the night of February 17, as a wave of protests contesting election results spread across the country. To this day, Pakistanis still cannot access the ex-Twitter app without one of the best VPNs, together with Meta's Facebook and Instagram and, since November 21, Bluesky.
Data suggests censorship tactics have become more technically sophisticated, with these advanced techniques likely to also target circumventing tools like VPNs.
Overall, experts believe that this increase in censorship is the main cause of the decline of the country's internet.
Can a VPN help?
A virtual private network (VPN) is the software that bypasses social media blocks. In addition to encrypting all your internet connections, a VPN spoofs your real IP address location, in fact, granting you access to otherwise geo-blocked content.
This is exactly why VPN usage has soared throughout the year, with Proton VPN recording an increase in sign-ups of over 350% at the beginning of November alone.
Yet, people could lose access to their VPN apps at the end of the month. November 30 is the deadline to register their services with the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) to avoid disruptions.
While the PTA urges businesses and freelance workers not to miss the registration deadline, the debate is still ongoing on whether or not commercial VPNs should also be blocked.
On November 15, Pakistan's religious chief said that using a VPN is against Islamic law and called for a ban – then blamed a typo error in the statement a few days later, The News reported. Yet, the Ministry of Interior also called to block all "illegal" VPNs on the same day, claiming that terrorists use these tools "to facilitate violent activities and financial transactions in Pakistan."
Even VPN providers are still in the dark about the fate of their users.
"It's still unclear how it will be implemented in practice if implemented at all," Gytis Malinauskas, Head of Legal at VPN provider Surfshark, told TechRadar.
"However, it seems that the government aims to block access to certain websites/services by blocking VPN access to people who are not registered as VPN users in Pakistan," he added.
At the beginning of the month, residents already experienced issues accessing their VPN tools for about 24 hours. What appeared to be the beginning of the crackdown on "unregistered" VPNs was later deemed a "brief technical glitch" by authorities. Surfshark was among the services temporarily throttled.
If you're looking for a way to keep accessing WhatsApp and other blocked platforms, I suggest checking out our best free VPN page to get all the most secure freebies out there without paying for them all. This will allow you to hop from one service to another in case of throttling. Tools like the Tor Browser could also help.
