KARACHI: Social media giant Facebook on Saturday restored for users in Pakistan an October 2017 post by Dawn.com that it had blocked around 20 hours earlier for allegedly violating local laws.

“Due to legal restrictions in your country, we’ve limited access to your post on Facebook,” the platform had shared in an automated message on Friday evening.

The post in question had linked to a story on veteran politician Javed Hashmi criticising the judiciary.

However, it was restored on Saturday evening, with Facebook apologising for the content being “incorrectly restricted”.

“Your content was incorrectly restricted. We’re very sorry about this mistake, and have now restored the content,” an automated message shared by the social networking website said.

The company had earlier said it had made the content unavailable “based on local law” — an action that is usually taken after requests from state institutions under non-transparent agreements.

Facebook, however, had not stated what law the Dawn.com post had violated, nor had it specified where the request had originated from.

Under fire for privacy concerns, hate speech and its role in ‘influencing’ the American elections, censorship under directions by governments is nothing new for Facebook.

The platform, with over 1.9 billion users across the globe, has been controversially restricting access to content.

Published in Dawn, May 13th, 2018