The Facebook page that led the Pakistan government to ban the entire site was back online Saturday, at least for some users, after it was inaccessible for about two days.
The page was removed Thursday after one of the moderators had his e-mail and Skype account hacked into, and his personal data revealed, according to a post on the page on Saturday. The moderator then got scared and deleted the page, a blog, and e-mails, according to the post.
In an interview with Radio Free Europe Liberty, one of page administrators confirmed that page was hacked and was successfully logged in by someone in Karachi, Pakistan. However, with facebook’s intervention they got the page back with all the date.
I think it was because… our earlier moderators’ accounts got hacked and they had to verify, because suddenly one of the guys, instead of logging in from Madrid, was logging in from Karachi, Pakistan. And you don’t move 5,000 miles in an hour.
So, it wasn’t facebook who had removed the page. In same interview, admin teasingly said:
I know the group’s been reported like 100,000 times, but Facebook did not block the entire thing, like Google would have done, or whoever else cares more about money than civil rights….
There were also a large number of protests on the streets of Pakistan on Wednesday and Thursday, objecting to the page.
“Facebook has not taken any action on this page,” a spokeswoman for the company said earlier on Saturday. The company had said on Thursday that it would not rule out making the content that Pakistan objected to inaccessible to users in Pakistan.
The PTA has said it would welcome contact from Facebook and YouTube to resolve the issue.
via PCWorld with additional input from Jabran Rafique