Pakistan again falsely branded as top porn searching country

Amid a recent news published by Pakistan’s top news websites such as Express Tribune, The Nation and Pakistan Today in which they had quoted an American site Salon citing that Pakistan topped in searching porn, we decided to conduct a little research on it to measure the authenticity of the news.

This tainted report further claims that several other Muslim countries top the charts for various sex-related search keywords such as pigs, donkeys, dogs, cats, horses, cows, goats, snakes, monkeys, bears, elephants, and the generic term animal.

It’s sad and shocking that top notch media houses in Pakistan specifically quote and chose those sites whose credibility has been a question mark even in their own country. And they just blindly post these type of news without going into research while putting their own country’s image at risk.

This is not the time to defame the country but prevailing the facts and some sanity. Although Pakistanis do search for porn, no doubt about it but it’s a global phenomenon and you can’t name one country for so many years consecutively for topping in porn related searches. The writer of Salon just seems to be unaware of facts and looks to have an anti-Pakistani agenda.

Here are some factors which raise questions about the validity of the published report.

Porn sites are banned in Pakistan:

First of all porn sites are banned in Pakistan and the only way people access them is the proxy sites, proxy browsers and hotspot shield. As many of us are aware of the fact that proxy sites alter the location from where the site is being accessed, therefore it is ridiculous to estimate Pakistan tops the porn search as VPN never shows current location on the web.

Plus, many people don’t even know about the proxy sites, thus cant approach porn sites anymore which also reduce the porn sites’ traffic that is generated from Pakistan.

As far as the search directly conducted from the original browser (other than proxies) is concerned, some people go and search porn related terms directly on Google due to lack of awareness. That doesn’t take them to their desired porn website due to blockage, but still Google records those searches.
But still the number of those searches on Google are far less than the original searches.

Number of users:

The internet penetration is only 10 percent in Pakistan, while most of the Western countries have more than 80 percent internet penetration. Therefore the probability of the porn related searches from the country with less internet users is far less than the search probability from majority of the users.

No clear reference:

The website Salon writes, “According to data released by Google”, while giving the reference to yet another sitemuslimsandtheworld.com. We checked that it didn’t even give the reference either and only mentioned, “Google recently released data detailing”. So there’s no official source from Google!!

Google Trends:

Google normally releases official search trends at the end of the year with respect to every country. In December, it released the stats about every country along with Pakistan and in the top 10 search keywords, there was not even a single porn related term. Following is what Pakistanis searched on Google in 2014.

• ARY News Live
• Express News Live
• PTV Sports
• Hiload
• Samaa TV
• Bigg Boss 8
• Baby Doll Song
• World Cup 2014
• Dhoom 3
• Yeh Hai Mohabbatein

 What current trends say?

Also, we tried the most typed porn related keywords such as “porn“, “sex” in which Papua New Guinea, Sri Lanka and India were among the top countries who searched those terms most and Pakistan was nowhere in the list. We checked the worldwide trend from January 2014 to Jan 2015.

In a nutshell, this data doesn’t tell the complete picture and it is very difficult to assess the traffic of porn sites from those countries where they are banned. Additionally, declaring any country being on top based on porn related searches is also imprecise because there are so many porn related terms out there and you also cannot define what falls in this category.

Fox News did a similar kind of misleading story in 2010 which compelled Google to step