Twitter has reportedly blocked the official account of the Pakistan government in Gilgit-Baltistan, part of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), and is showing the region’s location as the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir, Pakistani news outlet Dawn reported.
According to the Dawn report, even when users from Gilgit-Baltistan (GB) turn on their location feature, tweets sent from the region are marked as being sent from India.
Gilgit-Baltistan and the so-called Azad Kashmir form the Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, which India claims as part of the disputed Jammu-Kashmir region.
The issue came to light when several users from the GB area took to Twitter to complain that they were unable to access the Pakistan government’s official Twitter page. When they tried to open the account, they were greeted with the message, “Account Withheld @GovtofPakistan’s account has been withheld in India in response to a legal demand.”
The Pakistan government’s account has been banned in India since March 2023, after it was withheld twice in 2022 over ‘legal complaints’.
Several users took to Twitter to show screenshots where they were unable to access the said account from their phones.
Furthermore, the tweets have been marked as originating from Jammu and Kashmir, which was confirmed by Twitter user Karim Shah Nizari, who is based in the Yasin Valley of Ghizer district.
Users in GB were getting the option ‘Jammu and Kashmir’ when they tried to add location information to their tweets.
Nizari claimed that the Pakistan government should take ‘serious cognizance’ of the issue as India ‘might have influenced Twitter to change GB’s geo-tagging’.
However, the provincial government in Pakistan-occupied Gilgit-Baltistan said that the reports were ‘baseless’ and asked users to not share ‘fake news’.
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