SRINAGAR: Twitter users in Gilgit-Baltistan (GB) were surprised when they couldn’t access the government’s official account. They were greeted with a message saying the account had been withheld in India due to a legal demand. This issue caught attention after several complaints from GB users.
Interestingly, Pakistan’s official account has been banned in India since March 2023. Additionally, it was previously withheld twice in 2022 because of legal complaints.
Furthermore, some Gilgit Baltistan Twitter users noticed that their tweets were marked as originating from India instead of Gilgit Baltistan when they enabled the location feature. This raised concerns among users, who suspected India’s influence on Twitter to alter the region’s geo-tagging.
In response to the growing controversy, the Gilgit Baltistan government’s information department issued a press release denying any restrictions on the government’s official account in GB. They labeled the claims on social media as baseless. However, despite these statements, both users and officials continue to report that the account remains inaccessible.
The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) took to twitter and said that there is no evidence of Twitter blocking access to the government’s official account or changing the region’s location to India.
“Reference news circulating on social media and certain section of news media that Twitter has blocked access to the Government of Pakistan’s official account in Gilgit-Baltistan and changed the region’s location to parts of India, PTA would like to clarify that that the matter has been thoroughly investigated and no such problem has been found, as being circulated in the media,” it added.
PTA stated that after a detailed on-ground testing, it appears that the “sporadic issues” were limited to a few iOS devices. “These incidents are not significant and do not reflect a widespread problem,” it added.
