ISLAMABAD — Content flagged for violating “decency and morality” standards accounts for nearly seven in every ten website addresses blocked by Pakistan’s telecom regulator, according to enforcement data that offers one of the most detailed public breakdowns this year of how the country decides what to remove from the internet.
Figures from the Web Analysis Division (WAD) of the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) show the regulator blocked 1,065,671 of 1,075,762 URLs reported under the decency-and-morality category, a 99.06% removal rate. That single category accounts for roughly 69% of all URLs PTA has blocked in the current reporting cycle — more than every other category combined — in a dataset covering figures through July 2026.
PTA’s Web Analysis Division processed 1,726,303 URLs in total during the period. Of those, 1,542,800 were blocked, 76,874 remain under review and 106,629 were rejected outright, for an overall blocking rate of 89.37%.
PTA URL Blocking by Category
| Category | URLs Blocked | Blocking Rate |
|---|---|---|
| Decency and morality | 1,065,671 | 99.06% |
| Terrorism-related material | 141,897 | 79.15% |
| Against the glory of Islam | 112,482 | 82.17% |
| Security and defence of Pakistan | 74,059 | 59.05% |
| Sectarian and hate speech | 52,776 | 68.96% |
| Defamation and impersonation | 17,356 | 39.27% |
| Contempt of court | 7,716 | 76.28% |
| Proxy websites | 10,318 | 99.99% |
The breakdown is the clearest public accounting so far of how Pakistan enforces Section 37 of the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (PECA) 2016, the law that gives PTA authority to remove or restrict online content it judges unlawful. It shows morality-related complaints, rather than terrorism or national-security material, driving the bulk of the country’s URL-blocking activity — both in raw volume and in how consistently complaints result in a block.
Behind decency and morality, terrorism-related material was the next-largest category: 141,897 blocks from roughly 179,000 reported URLs, a 79.15% rate. Content classified as being “against the glory of Islam” recorded 112,482 blocks, an 82.17% rate. Material concerning the “security and defence of Pakistan” was blocked 74,059 times, a 59.05% rate — the lowest among the major categories, and a sign those complaints receive more individualized review before a takedown.
Sectarian and hate-speech content accounted for 52,776 blocks, a 68.96% rate, and contempt-of-court material was blocked 7,716 times, a 76.28% rate. Defamation and impersonation complaints had the lowest approval rate of any category in the disclosure: 17,356 blocks out of 44,200 reports, or 39.27% — evidence that reputational-harm complaints face a higher evidentiary bar than religious or moral content does. Proxy websites, typically used to circumvent government blocks, were removed almost automatically: 10,318 of 10,319 reports, a 99.99% rate consistent with automated filtering rather than case-by-case review.
PTA URL Blocks by Platform
PTA’s data also break blocks down by platform. Outside the named social media services, a bucket the regulator labels “Others/Miscellaneous” — covering standalone websites rather than accounts hosted on large platforms — recorded the single largest volume in the entire dataset: 899,415 URLs processed and 891,772 blocked, a 99.15% rate.
Platform-Level URL Blocking
| Platform / Category | URLs Processed | URLs Blocked | Blocking Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Others/Miscellaneous | 899,415 | 891,772 | 99.15% |
| 287,362 | 230,270 | 80.13% | |
| TikTok | 195,625 | 170,231 | 87.02% |
| X | 143,670 | 74,236 | 51.67% |
| YouTube | 74,823 | 66,290 | 88.60% |
| 54,335 | 45,510 | 83.76% | |
| 55,414 | 50,165 | 90.53% |
Among major social media platforms — Facebook, TikTok, X, YouTube and Instagram — YouTube posted the highest blocking rate, 88.60% (66,290 of 74,823 processed URLs), while X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, posted the lowest, 51.67% (74,236 of 143,670), with 41,075 requests rejected outright, more than any other platform in the disclosure. Facebook had the largest volume among social platforms, with 230,270 of 287,362 reported URLs blocked (80.13%), followed by TikTok at 87.02% (170,231 of 195,625) and Instagram at 83.76% (45,510 of 54,335). Among messaging and video-sharing apps, WhatsApp posted a 90.53% blocking rate (50,165 of 55,414 processed URLs); smaller platforms SnackVideo, Bigo and Likee together accounted for roughly 15,000 processed URLs, most of them blocked.
How PTA Blocks Online Content
PTA carries out blocks under Section 37 of PECA, which empowers the authority to order the removal of material it deems unlawful, including content related to blasphemy, obscenity, terrorism, hate speech, child sexual abuse imagery and material targeting state institutions. Enforcement runs through two channels. For content hosted on major platforms, PTA files takedown requests directly with the companies — several of which, including Meta, publish their own periodic transparency reports acknowledging government requests. For standalone websites outside those platforms, PTA directs Pakistan’s licensed telecom operators and internet service providers, including Jazz, Zong, Ufone, Telenor and PTCL, to restrict access at the network level. The “blocking rate” cited throughout PTA’s disclosure — the share of processed complaints resulting in a block, as opposed to rejection or continued review — is the single metric applied consistently across every category and platform in the dataset.
Enforcement Activity Continues to Rise
The scale reflects a continued rise in enforcement activity. PTA reported blocking more than 1.4 million URLs earlier in 2026, before the cumulative total passed 1.54 million by July. Pakistan’s Economic Survey 2025-26 separately disclosed that the authority blocked 88,035 URLs during the period it covered, with decency and morality again the largest category, followed by anti-state activity, national security, hate speech and sectarian content — independent confirmation, from a separate official document, of the same category ranking found in the WAD data. A joint submission by PTA and Pakistan’s National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency to the National Assembly in April 2026 put a broader enforcement tally — illegal URLs and obscene domains combined — above 8 million, though that figure spans additional enforcement categories and is not directly comparable to the WAD breakdown.
PTA has told Parliament it has expanded cooperation with Meta, Google, TikTok and Telegram, including API-based compliance systems and priority-escalation channels intended to speed the removal of terrorism-related content specifically. The current disclosure does not indicate whether comparable automation applies to the morality category, which already carries both the highest volume and one of the highest approval rates in the dataset.
Impact on Pakistani Internet Users
For Pakistani internet users and the businesses that rely on platforms operating in the country, the data quantifies a pattern digital rights groups have raised for years: content flagged for violating social or religious norms is removed at a far higher rate, and in far greater volume, than content tied to PTA’s stated national-security priorities. The gap has practical consequences for anyone filing or contesting a complaint — a defamation report faces roughly a 39% chance of resulting in a block, while a morality or proxy-site complaint is all but certain to succeed. Pakistan’s internet-restriction practices have previously drawn scrutiny from international monitors such as Freedom House, which tracks online censorship globally, and VPN use remains common among Pakistani users seeking to reach material blocked under any of PTA’s categories.
Digital rights advocates in Pakistan have repeatedly pressed PTA to publish category-by-category reasoning for individual blocks and to establish a formal appeals process for website operators and users who believe content was wrongly restricted; neither is currently mandated under PECA. International organizations monitoring online speech have separately urged Pakistan to align its blocking practices with due-process standards. PTA has not issued a public statement addressing the category-level breakdown specifically.
Future PTA Enforcement Disclosure
PTA has not published a timetable for its next enforcement disclosure. The regulator has updated its figures more than once in 2026, including a partial release earlier in the year and the more detailed, category-level dataset made public in early August. Whether category breakdowns of this kind become a regular feature of PTA’s public reporting under PECA has not been addressed by the authority.
The July 2026 figures stand, for now, as PTA’s most detailed public accounting of how consistently different categories of online content are removed from the Pakistani internet — and of how far morality-related enforcement outpaces every other stated priority in the regulator’s own data.
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