Twitter has agreed to block “blasphemous” tweets in Pakistan

At first glance, Twitter’s international policy on censorship seems reasonable. If the laws of a particular country require content to be locally blocked, then Twitter will adhere to that, deeming it to be a lesser evil than having the social network blocked in its entirety. This is what’s just happened in Pakistan, where five requests from a government office have, for the first time, resulted in “blasphemous” and “unethical” tweets being blocked to Pakistani users. However, critics say that, in practice, Twitter’s policy isn’t working fairly because it’s giving too much power to would-be censors who don’t actually have any authority to block or delete content.