Pakistan Blocks 5 Dating Apps Due To Immoral Content Including Tinder And Grindr

The Pakistani government has banned the usage of five dating applications, including Grindr and Tinder, as they contain and disseminate immoral content, which is against the laws of the country. The government has issued several notices to Grindr, Tinder, SayHi, Skout, and Tagged to remove their dating services from the country. Homosexuality and extra-marital affairs are illegitimate in Pakistan, as the country is 2^nd largest Muslim majority nation across the world. According to the internet regulators of the country, the dating app’s companies have not responded to the given notices within the time period provided.

Display of Immoral Content through dating apps

The spokesman for Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) stated that this decision to block dating applications in Pakistan due to their explicable and immoral content had been made to bring the managing parties of these applications back into a legal and moral realm. The leadership of these platforms should manage and moderate their applications and remove all content that falls under the obscene and unethical category.

Skout, Tagged, Grindr and Tinder have provided no immediate comments regarding these requests made by the Pakistani government regarding the display of immoral content, whereas the management of SayHi was unable to be in contact to provide any comment. According to the data collected from Sensor Tower indicated that the top dating site Tinder had been downloaded for 440,000 times in Pakistan in the time period of the last 12 months. While Tagged, SayHi and Grindr each have been downloaded for about 300,000 times, and Skout to be downloaded 100,000 times in the same time duration.

Blocking on internet

According to the critics, the Pakistani government is seeking control of freedom of expression on the internet from the citizens of Pakistan by removing and blocking of media that has been deemed as immoral content along with news that is critical to the country’s military and government. This most recent action by the government of Pakistan, which is banning of top five dating apps in an attempt to reduce the display of explicit and immoral content, shows that Pakistan is ramping their efforts towards the free flow of ideas on the internet which is allowed according to the country’s laws and regulations.

The citizens of Pakistan will then be used to a domineering level of censorship that prevents the general public from accessing any content connected to nudity, the LGBTQ community, or anything that is considered as immoral content. The reason for banning immoral content in dating applications is because having extra-marital affairs is an illegal act of crime in Pakistan. Due to which several dating sites have been targeted by the government as they feel that illegal actions are being fuelled by immoral content due to the availability of online dating applications across the country.

In the month of July, the Pakistani government has given a final warning to the makers of the video-sharing application TikTok due to the display of explicit and immoral content posted on their application platform. This is not the first time the government of Pakistan has blocked access to the online platform. In the past recent years, YouTube and Facebook were also blocked for some time period for displaying immoral content to the general public of Pakistan.

In the past few weeks, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority has asked YouTube to straight away block any content that contains nudity, immoral, and vulgarities or hate speech to be viewed and streamed inside Pakistan. The banning of several social media platforms in Pakistan is being done to increasing immoral content displayed on the pages, which is completely against the Islamic teachings and the laws and regulations of the country as the nation is the Islamic Republic.

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