Pakistan Blocks Twitter

By Polly Davis Doig,  Newser Staff
Posted May 20, 2012 7:56 AM CDT
Pakistan Blocks Twitter
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo speaks during the 2011 Web 2.0 Summit on October 17, 2011 in San Francisco.   (Getty Images)

Pakistan has decided it's had about 139 characters too many of Twitter, yanking the microblogging site over material it says is offensive to Islam, reports al-Jazeera. The material in question was promoting a Facebook contest to post images of the prophet Mohammed—which are considered blasphemous, even those framed in positive terms. "We have been negotiating with them [Twitter] until last night, but they did not agree to remove the stuff, so we had to block it,'' says the country's telecommunications chief. No word on how long Twitter will be down. (More Pakistan stories.)

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