In Pakistan, netizens are turning to virtual personal networks to access social media platform X after the site was blocked over the weekend following disputed national elections and an admission of voter fraud through a local government official.
VPNs, which can hide users’ identities and locations to make it easier to access sites and internet facilities that might be blocked in a certain region, have become increasingly popular since access to X, formerly known as Twitter, was disrupted for much of the year. country. world.
While social media platforms have been hit by challenges in Pakistan over the past month, the challenge came to a head around noon ET on Saturday and Friday morning, limited in the country for five days, according to a watchdog. Netblocks service.
Top10VPN, an independent VPN review website, reported that demand for VPNs in Pakistan increased by as much as 131% on Sunday, the first full day of the X outage, and continued until Monday, when demand was 91% above average.
Nord Security, a VPN provider in Pakistan, told Forbes that interest in its products doubled on Sunday and reached 4x its usual traffic for the week on Tuesday, while ExpressVPN said traffic to its country from Pakistan increased by as much as 67% in the first 24 hours after the outage. and higher up to 80% over the next 4 days.
Surfshark, another provider in the country, said its new user acquisition rates in Pakistan increased by 300% to 400% from last month, “indicating a growing reliance on them for web access and privacy. “
Pakistan’s U. S. media outfit, Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), the centrist party whose leader Imran Khan jailed ahead of this past month’s election, posted on X on Wednesday that the Pakistani government had also begun blocking popular VPN services.
“The latest crackdown on social media in Pakistan is a continuation of a broader trend of restricting access to the web and infringing on virtual rights in the country,” Lauren Hendry Parsons, privacy advocate at ExpressVPN, said in an article with Forbes. “This is another example of a global decline in freedom on the web, as more and more countries have become more comfortable imposing web shutdowns. “
Pakistan’s recent restrictions on social media began on Saturday, when a government official admitted that he helped manipulate the effects of the February 8 national election. Liaqat Ali Chattha, Rawalpindi commissioner, said he would hand over to the police after “personally supervising” the replacement of 70,000 votes. The admission of fraud came a week after a highly disputed national election in which Khan was jailed ahead of the vote and charges against the leader of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) party, who is the candidate. wanted by the Pakistani army, have been abandoned. Following Khan’s conviction, the use of the PTI symbol to identify party applicants on national ballots was banned, a move described as an access challenge for the approximately 62% of people in the country who cannot read. , and for all PTI applicants. They were forced to run as independents. PTI-backed candidates won more votes than any other party, but because each candidate ran individually, the PML-N was the biggest single-party winner in Parliament. Both teams declared victory and Sharif announced his goal of forming a coalition government. The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) has called for an investigation into allegations of election fraud, according to the Times of India.
That’s the number of times Pakistan has imposed web restrictions so far this year, according to Surfshark. Of those, 3 took positions in February and were directly similar to the elections. The other two occurred in January at virtual events organized through PTI. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller on Wednesday suggested the Pakistani government “restore all social media that has been restricted, adding Twitter. “Elon Musk, owner of X and the world’s second-richest person, has not publicly commented on the outage.
Those who were able to access X persecuted Umar Saif, Pakistan’s acting generation minister, after posting several messages on the platform after the outage began, implying that he used a VPN to circumvent the government’s wishes. Saif has posted original content on X 4 times and retweeted a post since February 18, adding a post showing the expansion of Pakistan’s IT industry. None of his messages referred to the interruption. ‘Sir, what VPN are you to tweet this?'” asked user X. Anas Mallick, a reporter for WIONews, responded to a message posted on Wednesday with “Please let us know which VPN you are to tweet this to gain advantages for the general public. “
Pakistan is rarely the only country to experience an increase in VPN usage following a change in policy. Nord Security said traffic spikes like those seen in Pakistan this week were also seen in 2022, when news emerged that China was contemplating taking over the entirety of Hong Kong. Kong and the U. S. in 2017, when the FCC repealed net neutrality rules. Similar spikes also occurred in the U. K. in 2016, when the country passed the so-called “Snoopers Statute” Act, which allows the government to collect online data on its citizens and store it through personal companies.