Pakistan Blocks Twitter

Pakistan blocked access to Twitter on Sunday after the social network would not take down messages related to a competition involving pictures of the Prophet Muhammad. “We have been negotiating with them until last night, but they did not agree to remove the stuff, so we had to block it,” Mohammad Yaseen, chairman of the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, told reporters. Depictions of the Prophet Mohammad are considered blasphemous by many Muslims. Some Pakistanis were able to continue to use Twitter on Sunday by using location-hiding programs. Nadeem Paracha, a columnist in the country, tweeted that the move was “another cheap moral stunt by Pakistan.”