Facebook is looking to reopen offices in Pakistan.
Facebook, the meta-owned social network, has been asked to reopen operations in Pakistan, as it has in other nations such as India. The Pakistani government has contacted Facebook executives about the situation, and they have pledged to visit Pakistan shortly.
The invitation was extended at a meeting in Romania between Federal Minister for Information Technology (IT) Syed Aminul Haq and Meta officials. Around 186 ministerial delegations convened in the European country for the International Telecommunication Union Ministerial Conference (ITU PP-22).
During the conference, the IT Minister said that Pakistan expects its internet users to quadruple in the next years and that the country now has over 40 million Facebook users. Employees at Meta expressed delight with the rise of the internet in Pakistan, noting that the country’s Facebook users had also increased in recent years.
The IT Minister used the occasion to ask Facebook to establish local offices in Pakistan. Officials from the social media behemoth have said that they want to visit the nation shortly.
It should be noted that this is not the first time such a rumour has surfaced. Earlier this year Facebook executives reportedly discussed local offices in Pakistan with Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) Director Humayun Bashir.
The meeting lasted 3.5 hours, according to reports, and both sides covered a variety of topics. The Director made it plain that, like other South Asian nations such as India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh, creating a local office in Pakistan was a prerequisite for Facebook.