{"id":343498,"date":"2017-06-13T15:46:20","date_gmt":"2017-06-13T07:46:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techcrunch.com\/?p=1502820"},"modified":"2017-06-13T15:46:20","modified_gmt":"2017-06-13T07:46:20","slug":"man-in-pakistan-sentenced-to-death-for-blasphemous-facebook-comments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/man-in-pakistan-sentenced-to-death-for-blasphemous-facebook-comments\/","title":{"rendered":"Man in Pakistan sentenced to death for blasphemous Facebook comments"},"content":{"rendered":"

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There\u2019s disturbing news from Pakistan, where a man has been handed the death sentence for allegedly making\u00a0blasphemous comments on Facebook.<\/p>\n

The Guardian reports<\/a> that\u00a0Taimoor Raza was founded guilty of insulting the prophet Muhammad by a court this week. His charge relates to comments made during a debate about Islam with another user on the social network, who subsequently turned out to be an undercover counter-terrorism agent.<\/p>\n

This is the stiffest punishment that Pakistan has handed down for online comments to date.\u00a0The ruling is part of a wider crackdown on\u00a0blasphemous material on the internet. Pakistani authorities have pushed Google, Facebook and others to identify users posting such comments online, and they even asked their own citizens to be vigilant<\/a> of posts made from others.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe casual manner in which death sentences are handed in blasphemy cases coupled with the lack of orientation of Pakistani courts with technology makes this a very dangerous situation,\u201d Human Rights Watch representative Saroop Ijaz told The Guardian in a statement.<\/p>\n

In years past, Pakistan has issued temporary blocks on Facebook<\/a>, and then Twitter<\/a>. A three-year ban on YouTube<\/a>\u00a0was lifted last year.<\/p>\n

Featured Image: TechCrunch<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"\" There’s disturbing news from Pakistan, where a man has been handed the death sentence for allegedly making\u00a0blasphemous comments on Facebook. The Guardian reports that\u00a0Taimoor Raza was founded guilty of insulting the prophet Muhammad by a court this week. His charge relates to comments made during a debate about Islam with another user on the social network, who subsequently turned out… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n

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\"\"\/ <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5817,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[59,66,26],"class_list":["post-343498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-media","tag-techcrunch","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5817"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=343498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343498\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=343498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=343498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=343498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}