Internet censorship in Pakistan is due to the governments attempts to control information sent and received using social media and the Internet in Pakistan. Presently, as of December 2024, X is banned, despite the government using the platform to issue official statements.
The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) (Urdu: مقتدرہِ ٹیلی مواصلات پاکستان) is the telecommunication regulator of Pakistan, responsible for the establishment, operation and maintenance of telecommunication systems and the provision of telecommunication services in Pakistan. Headquartered in Islamabad, PTA also has regional offices located in Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar, Quetta, Muzaffarabad, Rawalpindi, Multan and Gilgit.
Livestreaming, live-streaming, or live streaming is the streaming of video or audio in real time or near real time. While often referred to simply as streaming, the real time nature of livestreaming differentiates it from other non-live broadcast forms of streamed media such as video-on-demand, vlogs and video-sharing platforms such as YouTube and Twitch (service).
WeChat or Weixin in Chinese ; lit. 'micro-message') is a Chinese instant messaging, social media, and mobile payment app developed by Tencent. First released in 2011, it became the world's largest standalone mobile app in 2018 with over 1 billion monthly active users. WeChat has been described as China's "app for everything" and a super-app because of its wide range of functions. WeChat provides text messaging, hold-to-talk voice messaging, broadcast (one-to-many) messaging, video conferencing, video games, mobile payment, sharing of photographs and videos and location sharing.
SHAREit is a peer-to-peer file sharing, content streaming and gaming platform that supports online and offline sharing of files and contents. It allows users access to short format videos and a wide range of games, making it a multimedia entertainment app for users. It works on various smartphone platforms and Windows, allowing users to share files between devices directly. SHAREit was developed as part of Lenovo at its initial stage but was later spun off and operated under a separate Singapore based technology company Smart Technology Pte. Ltd.
ByteDance Ltd. is a Chinese internet technology company headquartered in Haidian, Beijing and incorporated in the Cayman Islands.
Roposo is an Indian video-sharing social media service, owned by Glance, a subsidiary of InMobi. Roposo provides a space where users can share posts related to different topics like food, comedy, music, poetry, fashion and travel. It is a platform where people express visually with homemade videos and photos. The app offers a TV-like browsing experience with user-generated content on its channels. Users can also use editing tools on the platform and upload their content.
TikTok, whose mainland Chinese and Hong Kong counterpart is Douyin, is a short-form video hosting service owned by Chinese internet company ByteDance. It hosts user-submitted videos, which may range in duration from three seconds to 60 minutes. It can be accessed with a smart phone app or the web.
Likee is a short-video creation and sharing app, available for iOS and Android operating systems. It is owned by Singaporean tech firm Likeme Pte. Ltd., whose parent company is JOYY Inc. The founder of Likee is Jason Hu, entrepreneur from Singapore, who previously worked for JOYY.
Kuaishou Technology is a Chinese publicly traded partly state-owned holding company based in Haidian District, Beijing, that was founded in 2011 by Hua Su (宿华) and Cheng Yixiao (程一笑). The company is known for developing a mobile app for sharing users' short videos, a social network, and video special effects editor.
Huddles (originally Clash, Byte (via Acquisition), and later Huddles) was an American short-form video hosting service and creator monetization platform social network where users could create looping videos between 2–16 seconds long. It was created by a team led by Brendon McNerney and PJ Leimgruber who formerly worked together at NeoReach, Inc. Dom Hofmann was involved as the architect of much of the code, as the founder of Byte, a successor to Vine, which Hofmann co-founded, until the project was sold to Clash App, Inc., and subsequently renamed.
Zynn was a Chinese video-sharing social networking service owned by Kuaishou, a Beijing-based internet technology company established in 2011 by Su Hua and Cheng Yixiao. It was used to create and share short videos, and it pays its users for using the app and referring others. Zynn was launched on May 7, 2020. It became the most-downloaded app in the App Store in the same month. It has also been criticized for being a "pyramid scheme", and it has faced accusations of plagiarism and stealing content. Aside from Zynn in North America, Kuaishou is available under the name Kwai in Russia, South Korea, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brazil, America, India, and the Middle East. Kwai used to be available in Australia and the United States on the App Store, but was removed at an unknown date. Zynn was permanently shut down on the 20th of August, 2021.
Triller is an American video-sharing social networking service that was first released for iOS and Android in 2015. The service allows users to create and share short-form videos, including videos set to, or automatically synchronized to, music using artificial intelligence technology. It initially operated as a video editing app before adding social networking features.
Lark Suite is an enterprise collaboration platform developed by ByteDance and first released to the public in 2019.
TikTok v. Trump was a lawsuit before the United States District Court for the District of Columbia filed in September 2020 by TikTok as a challenge to President Donald Trump's executive order of August 6, 2020. The order prohibited the usage of TikTok in five stages, the first being the prohibition of downloading the application. On September 27, 2020, a preliminary injunction was issued by Judge Carl J. Nichols blocking enforcement of that executive order. The lawsuit, by then captioned TikTok v. Biden, was dismissed in July 2021, following the Biden Administration's rescission of the executive order.
Many countries have imposed past or ongoing restrictions on the video sharing social network TikTok. Bans from government devices usually stem from national security concerns over potential access of data by the Chinese government. Other bans have cited children's well-being and offensive content such as pornography.
There are reports of TikTok censoring political content related to China and other countries as well as content from minority creators. TikTok says that its initial content moderation policies, many of which are no longer applicable, were aimed at reducing divisiveness and were not politically motivated.
In 2020, the United States government announced that it was considering banning the Chinese social media platform TikTok upon a request from then-president Donald Trump, who viewed the app as a national security threat. The result was that TikTok owner ByteDance—which initially planned on selling a small portion of TikTok to an American company—agreed to divest TikTok to prevent a ban in the United States and in other countries where restrictions are also being considered due to privacy concerns, which themselves are mostly related to its ownership by a firm based in China.
Josh is a video-sharing social networking service, owned by VerSe Innovation – an Indian technology company based in Bangalore, India. Josh is an Indian short video app that was launched in immediately after the Indian Government banned TikTok and other Chinese apps in June 2020. The founders of the platform have promoted the app as the “Instagram for Bharat” referring to their focus on the Indian audience that speaks its own regional and state languages. Josh was among the top 10 most downloaded apps social and entertainment apps in India of 2021 and had 150 million monthly active users as per April 2022.
TikTok has been involved in a number of lawsuits since its founding, with a number of them relating to TikTok's data collection techniques.
