Facebook Fallout: Looking on the Bright Side

Sitting at Café Chattberbox in Zamzama, a hip little part of Karachi, drinking fresh peach juice. At the next table is a group of three men in their 20s or 30s talking about the downfall of Facebook in Pakistan. A guy sporting a goatee and an artfully aged t-shirt says his life has actually improved since the government shut down the social networking site. He’s now in much better touch with friends and family across the world. He moves his long hair off his shoulder and says, “Fuck man, people waste so much time on Facebook. They don’t even go to weddings or anything anymore. They just send a message.”

Since I arrived in Lahore almost a week ago, there have been numerous protests across Pakistan against Facebook because of a page that was created called “Everybody-Draw-Mohammed-Day” which encouraged users to draw cartoons of the prophet. I was late to my first meeting in Lahore because the car I was in got stuck behind a group of people protesting Facebook. One look at the crowd told me that most of the protesters were not Facebook users. How, I wondered, did these middle-aged men find out about the page on Facebook anyway?

A conversation a few days later with a lawyer in Lahore explained the trickle-down effect. The simplified version goes like this: Muslim clerics in faraway, but connected, places like London and Amsterdam, come to know about blasphemous Facebook pages from youth in their communities. These clerics tell their friends in Islamic Republics like Pakistan. Together, the clerics and their political cronies stir up their constituencies. It doesn’t matter what freedom of speech and freedom of expression are. What matters is that Mohammed has been blasphemed. The locals are encouraged, prodded even, to protest. It’s one more page in the big book of “Anger Towards the West” (see the recent New York Times article if you need more fuel for this fire).

So, while many in Lahore and Karachi and Rawalpindi and Islamabad have no idea what Facebook is, they marched through the streets to protest the material on it. And, a day or two later, the judiciary instructed the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority to block the site. And so it was. Many people are unhappy about it. But, there is one hipster in Zamzama who has seen the bright side. He goes on to say, “I don’t know how much longer I can stay here. I mean, as long as I don’t turn on the news, I’m fine.” Don’t worry, maybe they’ll block that soon, too.