The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has been sent with a notice by the Peshawar High Court (PHC) to respond to a petition that requests that the video-sharing app TikTok be completely banned due to “blasphemous and immoral” material.
Because authorities believe the app promotes immoral content, the video-sharing platform was originally banned in Pakistan in October 2020 and has since been banned at least three more times.
Advocate Imran Khan filed a petition asking the court to order the respondents to the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), PTA, and Ministry of Information to permanently ban TikTok from Pakistan due to consistent violations of the law and rules.
A bench consisting of Chief Justice Ishtiaq Ibrahim and Justice Sahibzada Asadullah heard on Thursday the request of the petitioner for interim relief seeking removal of all the objectionable material from TikTok till final disposal of the petition.
He also prayed the court to direct the respondents to not allow such applications in future which affect moral and ethical values of the people in Pakistan.
He said that there were benefits of social media, but some social media platforms had opened the way to express anything disregarding decency, morality and the values of Islam in countries like Pakistan.
The petition said that “TikTok, being a publicly accessible application, has failed to adequately optimise its system to proscribe such criminal, hateful, unethical, and vulgar content.
Moreover, it has failed to enforce a complete ban on such content, thereby breaching its own content policy and serving as a prominent platform for such objectionable entities,” it said.
