There are two Pakistani internets. One is filtered link by link from Islamabad. The other runs through Bradford, Birmingham and Houston, and it is where much of the country's creator scene actually works.

In October the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority published the scorecard of its takedown machine. According to PTA data reported by ProPakistani, the regulator has sent 1,789,022 URLs to social media platforms for action, and 1,577,936 of them were blocked. That is a blocking rate of 88.2 percent.

The breakdown shows who listens. TikTok blocked 184,686 of the 208,268 links PTA sent it. Facebook blocked 244,981 of 311,699. X, formerly Twitter, blocked only 78,871 of 162,878, less than half. The biggest bucket of all, labelled "Others/Misc", had 891,772 of its 900,222 links blocked.

A list that only works at home

All of this works on one side of the screen: what a viewer inside Pakistan can open. A link that is blocked in Lahore is still a working link in Leeds.

Even inside the country, blocking works less through technology than through habit. When X was blocked in Pakistan, the PTA chairman told lawmakers in August 2024 that usage of X had fallen by 70% despite the availability of VPNs. "Only 30% of people are using VPN," he said. He also put internet access at about 56% of the population. Those are an official's figures given to parliament, not an independent measurement, but the logic is easy to believe. Most people do not fight a block. They just go elsewhere or stop.

The other Pakistan

Now look at the other side. In the 2021 census, 1,587,822 people in England and Wales described their ethnicity as Pakistani, 2.7 percent of the population. Add the communities in the US, Canada and the Gulf, and there is a large Pakistani audience that the PTA's list never touches.

That audience mostly lives in English. The same census found that Urdu was the main language of about 270,000 people in England and Wales, and Panjabi of about 291,000. Set that against 1.59 million people of Pakistani heritage and the picture is clear. Even if every Urdu speaker in the count were Pakistani, most British Pakistanis would still have named another language, in practice English, as their main one. Urdu and Punjabi live on in families, songs and jokes. Day-to-day life, and day-to-day scrolling, happens in English.

Where the creators are

That split shapes Pakistani creators far more than any takedown list does. A creator in Karachi who wants to earn from adult content works on a foreign platform, priced in dollars, for a paying audience that is mostly abroad. A British Pakistani creator in Birmingham does the same thing from the other end, with no block between her and her subscribers.

Even the working day splits. Pakistan runs on UTC+5 with no daylight saving, so an evening post from Lahore lands in the British afternoon, while a creator in Bradford is often online when Karachi is already asleep.

Creators on both sides have reasons to be careful. Many use stage names, crop their faces out of shots or use OnlyFans' country-level geo-blocking setting to hide their page from Pakistan or the Gulf entirely. The platform still checks every creator's real identity and age privately. It just does not make them public.

So the label tells you about heritage, not address. A list built around it shows where Pakistani creators actually are on OnlyFans: in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad, and just as often in Bradford, Manchester, Houston or Toronto, writing mostly in English and switching to Urdu, Roman Urdu or Punjabi in chat when a fan asks. The list cannot promise that a given page opens from inside Pakistan, because many creators deliberately switch that off.

Two sides of one block

The PTA will keep sending links, and most platforms will keep complying. Inside Pakistan, viewers will keep finding that a lot of the internet simply is not there.

The creators of Pakistani heritage have built their work on the other side of that line. The list reaches the viewer at home. It was never going to reach the community abroad.