Porn Ban Hits Bangladesh, 20,000 Sites Now Blocked, Govt Says

Following two of the country’s South Asian neighbors, India and Nepal, Bangladesh—a predominantly Muslim country of 167 million people—has moved to ban online porn, blocking or aiming to block nearly 20,000 adult sites, along with approximately 2,200 gambling sites, according to the country’s Telecommunications and Information Technology Minister Mustafa Jabbar, in a report by The Dhaka Tribune.  After a Bangladeshi high court in November issued a ruling that would require the government to block all online porn for a six-month period, Jabbar declared what he called “a continuous war” against pornography in the 48-year-old country, which broke away from Pakistan (Bangladesh was previously known as East Pakistan) in a bloody 1971 war.  "I want to create a safe and secure internet for all Bangladeshis, including children. And this is my war against pornography. And this will be a continuous war," Jabbar told the French news agency AFP.  But porn and gambling sites are not the sole targets of Jabbar’s “war.” Social media has already come under the ban, with the apps Tik Tok and Bigo both blocked because authorities in Bangladesh said they have been “misused.” "We are monitoring the local Facebook profiles, YouTube channels and websites also," Jabbar told AFP. ”A few of them were taken down for having obscene content. We advised a few others not to post anything that goes against our social norms." But what are those “norms,” exactly? According to the AFP report, the country has about 90 million internet users, meaning that over half of the population is wired, and perhaps unsurprisingly the names of porn stars consistently rank among the most-searched terms for Bangladeshis.  The crackdown even hit one of the country’s top social media stars over the weekend. Sanai Mahbub, who calls herself Sayanee Mahboob on Instagram, and who regularly posts images which, albeit fully clothed, emphasize her outsized and surgically enhanced bustline, was summoned by police in the country’s capital city of Dhaka on Sunday and ordered by cops to remove certain, supposedly “vulgar” images from her social media accounts, according to AFP.  "We highly respect freedom of speech in a democratic system. But her content has drawn protests from angry parents," said Dhaka police official Nazmul Islam. But Bangladeshi porn fans are already finding ways around the ban, using VPN networks, while many porn sites have created “mirrors” that contain the same content but at different internet addresses, staying one step ahead of the government blockages, according to Yahoo! News. "This is a continuous process and it needs regular monitoring. These websites are very well aware of the regulations and they come up with thousands of mirror sites every week," said Emdadul Hoque, general secretary of the country’s major ISP industry group. Photo By Nurunnaby Chowdhury / Wikmedia Commons