Understanding Systemic Disinformation on Social Media in Pakistan

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Muhammad Akram     7 February 2021

Social media has become such a companion that most of us cannot resist scrolling our profile feeds every couple of hours to see if there is a notification or new post in the network. There are various reasons for this consistent focus, such as intent to be an influencer, motivation to keep connected with friends and industry and earn money through monetization. Most of the users find social media as platforms to receive the latest news and stories of their interest with a misconception, to some degree, that mainstream media is often biased. Most users often are unaware of the sources and intent of information they receive on social media feeds, and the dilemma is that many of the users are not aware of how or if the information verification is needed. Given this, freedom of content creation on social media platforms has been heavily utilized by radical and political groups to flood the target audience, particularly youth, with propaganda and misinformation.

Social media has made the Pakistanis politically aware. It has also brought a complex web of various other issues in the country, including the widened religious and political polarization among people affiliated with diverse ideas and belief systems. Since there is the least level of critical social media literacy among the masses, there is limited ability to verify the authenticity of the information we receive on social media. Most of the social media users are confined in their narrow worldview and believe in the information they receive in their confined network. Social media algorithms are designed to provide its users the information they like the most; it offers a limited opportunity to the users to know more outside that confined circle. Since we, the Pakistanis, pause our social media feeds when we get to some news with religious or political sensation, the algorithms note that pause as our choice of being on a social media platform. The algorithms determine our cognition from that pause and then flood selective relevant content on our social media feed. Being a religiously and politically fragile nation with limited social media literacies, we hardly bother to verify the information we receive on social media and start believing in commenting and sharing. Here we create an opportunity for the extremist groups in political and religious spheres to misuse our social media illiteracies for their radical narratives and propaganda.

With a 64 percent population under 30 years of age and 18 percent as social media users, Pakistan faces a multifaceted phenomenon fueling radicalization among individuals and institutions. The issue gets more complexed when the country’s education system does not prepare its students for critical thinking, which leaves the space for radical narratives to influence the youth’s perspectives and worldviews. Being at the focus of social media companies and extremist groups, youth on the internet fall prey to the radical ideologies they interact with on social media. Still, their critical social media illiteracy does not let them process an authenticity check. Thus, unknowingly, youth become agents of multiplying the radicalized narratives designed by some religious and political groups to ground their ideologies and seek public support. There are various banned extremist outfits in the country with an active presence on social media platforms to keep their followers updated and gain new followers – and even recruitments. Apart from that, we can count various examples when the social media posts were reasons of serious harm and even deaths in the country – either through religious reasons like blasphemy, opinions against the dominant political patterns, or power tussle between different caste groups or tribes.

The government of Pakistan has introduced different initiatives like the Surf Safe to monitor and counter extremist content online. Still, those are least effective as the majority of the population is not even aware of it. We cannot witness any initiative in the country educating the youth on critical social media literacy to responsibly utilize the platforms with the ability to believe in authentic and verified information. This behavior of verification, if adopted, will help Pakistan denounce radicalized and extremist narratives and ultimately contribute to peace and stabilization.

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