Pakistan’s Senate Standing Committee on Information Technology and Telecommunication held a charged session on April 30, 2026, chaired by Senator Palwasha Khan, during which X was formally accused of systematic content bias, PTA’s compliance data was laid out before lawmakers, and the imminent transfer of social media regulatory authority to a newly established body was confirmed.
Senator Palwasha Khan directed pointed criticism at X during the session, accusing the platform of selectively removing content critical of Israel while leaving other material untouched. She specifically cited the deletion of a post by Defence Minister Khawaja Asif as an example of what she characterised as politically motivated censorship. PTA Chairman Major General (Retd.) Hafeez ur Rehman responded by clarifying that the Defence Minister had never filed an official complaint with the authority over the deleted post and had dismissed the incident when PTA reached out, describing it as a matter concerning his personal account. The exchange illustrated the procedural gap between political grievances about social media conduct and the formal complaint mechanisms through which PTA can act. X’s compliance record, however, speaks for itself independently of any single incident: the platform currently holds the lowest cooperation rate among major social media companies in Pakistan, acting on just 27 percent of requests submitted by PTA, a figure that has made it a persistent point of friction between the regulator and the platform’s management.
Meta was also raised during the session, with Pakistani security officials formally reviewing the company’s cooperation on local cybercrime matters. PTA filed over 150,000 complaints directly with Meta over the past year alone, reflecting the scale of the problem. Overall social media platform compliance has improved following direct PTA interventions, with the average compliance rate climbing from 30 percent to 64 percent across platforms. WhatsApp, also owned by Meta, stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from X, recording a 98 percent compliance rate on received complaints, making it the most cooperative platform in the country by a significant margin.
The most structurally significant development confirmed at the session was the imminent transition of social media oversight from PTA to the newly established Social Media Regulatory Authority, known as SMPRA. Once SMPRA becomes fully operational, PTA’s role will be limited to content blocking, with the new authority assuming full control over social media oversight across Pakistan. The PTA Chairman also directed specific cybercrime-related matters to the National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency, noting that the agency is better positioned to brief the committee on those matters. The establishment of SMPRA represents the most significant reorganisation of Pakistan’s digital content regulatory architecture in years, and its practical effectiveness will depend heavily on whether it can achieve higher compliance rates from resistant platforms than PTA has managed to date.
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