Pakistani Court Orders Monitoring Sites For Offensive Material

The High Court of the Pakistani city Lahore has ordered the country’s Telecommunication authorities to monitor popular search engines and block about 17 sites carrying offensive material. The engines and sites being monitored include Google, Yahoo, Bing, MSN, YouTube and Wikipedia. The order came after a case was filed in the city’s High court by a citizen.

The monitoring order comes after Facebook faced a ban in Pakistan and Bangladesh in the last week of May 2010 over some offensive material which was taken back when Facebook officials apologised and removed it.

The order made clear that only the offensive links would be blocked in the country which will not affect access to any of the above mentioned monitored sites as happened in the case of the Facebook ban.