Facebook ban – a Pakistani’s perspective

If you are a writer and a copywriter, a situation like this is a dream come true; you get to define a massive situation spread across a whole country in one simple word. Silly

As of now, the whole domain of Facebook is banned. YouTube is banned. So is Wikipedia. Basically, three of the top five most-visited sites by Pakistanis are banned within Pakistan, as per the decision taken by the higher-ups.

Consider this: there you are, walking alone down a poorly lit street. Out of a dark corner, your worst fears come true. A dog appears and menacingly barks at you. You instinctively stop in your tracks. The dog is barking, edging closer to you. At that very moment, your whole body tells you to ‘flee’, to run like crazy. So you have a stimulus in the form of a barking dog, and you have your instant, emotional reaction of ‘run now!’. But what would you do? You, in all probabilities, would not run. Although the emotional response almost demands that you run for your life, experience tells you that the BEST WAY to handle this situation is to stay your ground. ‘Stay your ground’ is pretty much the opposite of your first reaction of running away, but experience with dogs tells you that you have a higher chance of not being bitten if you just stand your ground and ‘sush’ the dog away.

The first reaction of ‘banning’ the Facebook domain for something that they were not contacted to begin with, that first reaction sounds good enough. You are a country, and you have a population to answer to. But is that reaction the right one? Perhaps the BEST WAY of handling the situation lies doing something quite opposite? In ‘reasoning’ with the perpetrators? Perhaps. But where there’s a mob, there is no reasoning. Ten people walking down a dark street confronted by a barking dog would present a very different picture indeed.