Pakistani PM Shehbaz Sharif Criticized for Breaking X Ban to Congratulate Trump

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif was under withering flak for posting a congratulatory message on X after his government had banned the platform. Ironically, the Sharif administration had also enforced the ban on Twitter (now X) in early 2024, claiming national security concerns as microblogging site Twitter was being used by anti-state groups such as the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) to spread anti-national activities.

Pakistani PM Shehbaz Sharif Faces Criticism

The people have been criticizing Sharif since the recent post as to how he would have managed to go around the embargo in order to come up with this message. Well, the answer is, Sharif, like millions of other similar-minded people who use a VPN, or Virtual Private Network, to access restricted and blocked online content. Let's see how this works:

What is a VPN?
VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. It is a connectivity technology that creates secure and private connections over the internet between your device and a server. If you were working from home but wanted access to your office server, VPN would securely connect your device to the office network.

How Does a VPN Work?
With the VPN server, your traffic is encrypted in the unreadable form only you and the VPN server can decrypt. The use of a VPN also masks your original IP address and assigns to you a new one, which becomes quite challenging to monitor online activities.

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This incident has seen Sharif make use of VPNs so as to bypass Pakistan's X ban that has exposed him to heavy trolling and criticism, considering the fact that the platform was restricted by his own government.