Is Government unbanning PUBG in Pakistan?

It’s been hardly three days since the world-famous battlefield game ‘PUBG’;(Player Unknown’s Battleground) was banned in Pakistan by the Government on court orders pertaining to the cases of suicides committed by teens out of the frustration of playing this game for too long. The public having mixed opinions over the decision is expressing it freely over the internet and the top social media sites are flooded with trends in opposition to the decision. #unbanpubg is a top trend on twitter among Pakistani users.

Amidst this, the news of some users still playing the banned game via VPNs is yet another aspect. However, the most shocking among all these till now is the ‘teen suicides reported’ after the ban as a protest to the decision.

The Government has previously banned a lot of VPN services as they were not registered and some of them were involved in some illegal activities such as non-religious content and non-approved advertisements.

Will Government take back the decision& unban PUBG?

The Government& relevant authorities like PTA are under immense criticism and it is being heard that after the next hearing on 9^th July, the decision of banning PUBG will be taken back by the Government as the hashtag #unbanpubg is trending on social media like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and others as people are demanding to unban PUBG.

The authorities argued that the youngsters are becoming useless and toxic for the society as they play PUBG and other such games. But here a fair consideration would be that there are Pakistani Youngsters like Arsalan Ash who has won the e sports contest in a developed country like Japan and has highlighted positive image of Pakistan by playing a game professionally.

And there are a lot of other youngsters who are earning streamers and their career was based on a single game “PUBG’’ and their whole job and source of earning is destroyed.

A more constructive approach to solve the issues coming up regarding the use of  PUBG or any other social media platform would be to ‘regulate the use’ rather than ‘stop the use’. e.g. if someone faces hate comments or cyberbullying on Facebook or Twitter it is essential to put up solutions for making their use safe rather than stopping it at all. A very recent and exemplary action in this regard was taken by Twitter where they are actually making algorithm changes to remove words like ‘Master’, ‘Slave’, ‘Blacklist’ and other defaming terminologies against the black community to make it safer for them. Now, there explicitly exist black people or celebrities who would have made a mind to commit suicide on the hate they face online, but that didn’t account as a fair reason to ban that platform.

While, there is a dire need of control and regulation of social media in Pakistan which cannot be denied, it would be way better for the relevant agencies like PTA, FIA etc. to sit together and devise solutions for cleansing, regulation and monitoring of online platforms in Pakistan so that they are safe to use. A suggestion in this regard for PUBG usage regulation would be to register all PUBG players in Pakistan and then set some daily limit of playing hours for each of them.