Pakistan, 10th July 2023: Twitter has purportedly banned access to the Government of Pakistan’s official Twitter account in Gilgit-Baltistan and is presenting the location of GB as Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir.
According to the Pakistani publication ‘The Dawn’, Pakistani officials denied any such modifications, however locals’ tweets specifically highlighted changes in Twitter location and barred access to Pakistan Government official account.
The publication states that even after users turned off the app’s location feature, tweets sent from the region were marked as coming from India’s J-K. Multiple tweets circulated on Twitter, indicating changes to the microblogging site’s address and the barring of access to the Pakistan Government’s official account.
The problem was discovered after many Twitter users in Gilgit-Baltistan complained about being unable to access the government’s official account from the region.
When users attempted to access the account, a message popped up stating, “account has been withheld in India in response to a legal demand.”
Despite dozens of reports to the contrary, Pakistani officials denied any such changes and called the assertion “baseless.”
The Gilgit-Baltistan government stated, “There are no restrictions on the freedom of the internet, media and expression in the entire Gilgit Baltistan.”
The GB government has warned anyone who make similar claims on social media to avoid disseminating fake news.In a statement, the PTA denied reports circulating on social media and in certain sections of the news media that Twitter had barred access to the Government of Pakistan’s official account in Gilgit-Baltistan and relocated the territory to parts of India.
It stated that, “on-ground testing, it appears that any sporadic issues encountered are limited to very few iOS devices, affecting a small number of users. These incidents are not significant and do not reflect a widespread problem.”
