Pakistan lifts ban on YouTube
Tuesday, 6 May 2014
Pakistan's parliament on Tuesday voted unanimously to lift a ban on YouTube, in a non-binding resolution that was nonetheless welcomed by free speech campaigners as an important symbolic move. The video-sharing website has been blocked in Pakistan since September 2012 over its hosting of the "Innocence of Muslims" movie that sparked furious protests around the world. A US appeals court in February ordered Google, which owns YouTube, to remove the film after a lawsuit brought by an actress who says she was tricked into appearing in it, but the Pakistani ban remains in place. Shazia Marri, a lawmaker from the opposition Pakistan Peoples Party who put forward the resolution, said students and researchers were suffering as a result of the blackout, according to AFP.