Among the countries emulating China’s Great Firewall software net of online surveillance and censorship is Pakistan. Great idea, it thinks.
For months, Pakistan has been testing the Chinese Communist Party’s Great Firewall tech, “Censorship on Steroids.”
Poor connections
In late 2024, Al Jazeera reported that Pakistan’s deployment of the new technology sparked “a spate of complaints of poor internet connectivity in the country in recent months.”
“Since mid-July, internet users in Pakistan have reported frequent slowdowns, degraded service quality and occasional disruptions to multimedia features on WhatsApp, the widely used messaging app.”
Although they didn’t deny imposing more extensive online monitoring, government officials did deny that the slowdown had been caused by their intervention. Others at least partly attributed the connection problems to the use of virtual private networks (VPNS), software used to encrypt the user’s traffic and disguise his IP address in order elude government spying and barriers.
On the other hand:
Arturo Filasto, co-founder of the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI), confirmed that WhatsApp multimedia features had been “throttled” on July 17.
OONI data from August revealed similar interference, showing that internet traffic was “monitored” and that user attempts to connect with Signal, another encrypted communications app, were also impeded.
Jazz, the country’s largest mobile service provider, acknowledged receiving complaints about degraded internet services.
Pakistan is seeking more “granular” control of the Internet and ability to shut down critics or criticisms of the government, i.e., “misinformation.” In 2008, it tried to block a particular YouTube video and “ended up crashing YouTube globally.”
Misinformation
Such pervasive exercises in online repression have their supporters outside of governments. On Quora, a resident of Chengdu in China says that she was traumatized by coming across information about about Tiananmen Square and Falun Gong. “Amiable information is one of the reasons for supporting the Great Firewall I think.”
Another, also Chinese, supposes that the Great firewall may be necessary until the quality of the Chinese people improves. Until then, it “prevents poorly educated people…from knowing foreigners’ opinion about China.”
Some westerners also think that censorship in the manner of the Great Firewall is a great idea, just as may they believe that suppressing “misinformation” in the West is a good idea.
The publisher of a website on China called herecomeschina.com, Godfree Roberts, who finds CCP propaganda nutritious, says that the worthy purpose of the Great Firewall is to suppress damaging false information (he doesn’t mention the party-state’s suppression of damaging true information). “We know how much damage false information (propaganda) does when it gets out of control…. China does not want that to happen, so she regulates rumor-mongering at home and slows misinformation….”
Elsewhere, Roberts explains that “Chinese don’t have unions” because the whole country “is one big enormous union.” After all, a union is “a social organization formed and run by the workers.”
