Indian, Afghan social media accounts used to malign Pakistan: NSA

National Security Adviser Dr Moeed Yusuf said on Wednesday that a well-coordinated and calibrated social media campaign flaring anti-state trends on micro-blogging website Twitter was hatched to malign Pakistan in the prevailing tumultuous situation of Afghanistan.

Addressing a media conference alongside Federal Minister for Information and Broadcasting Chaudhry Fawad Hussain, the NSA launched a special analytical report prepared by Islamabad Policy Research Institute titled “Disinformation and Propaganda Campaign to Sabotage Afghan Peace Process” which critically deciphered the hashtags propagated to harm Pakistan’s image at the regional and global level.

Dr Moeed said Pakistan had presented a dossier to highlight its clandestine strides to damage Pakistan’s interest. The world, however, turned a blind eye to Indian terrorist activities against Pakistan as the dossier was sent to the states all over the world and the comity of nations expressed lull over it.

He said Pakistan was meticulously focusing the situation in Afghanistan and the think tanks under the National Security Division had worked tremendously to unearth the propaganda campaign on Twitter.

The NSA underscored that many Indian and Afghan accounts on Twitter ran a full-fledged campaign against Pakistan and mobilised anti-state trends to damage its role in the region.

“#SanctionPakistan trend on Twitter has gained huge momentum that created massive hype on the media. It has been perpetrated to attribute Afghan leadership’s failure on its soil with Pakistan,” Dr Moeed mentioned.

He added that senior Afghan officials were involved whereas some of them were exposed during the campaign.

The NSA elucidated the entire propaganda campaign as a thematic contour-based of five themes namely, discredit Pakistani government especially its Army, give air to subnational movements that have no mass on the ground both Pashtun and Baloch, direct targeting of China Pakistan Economic Corridor, get Pakistan on the blacklist of Financial Action Task Force and point all blame on Pakistan for chaos in Afghanistan.

He underlined that during the entire campaign 30-40 percent Bot activities (Robotic activity for generating content on social media) were involved in generating anti-Pakistan trends.
“Afghan and Indian official state accounts have been taking part in the propaganda campaign through synchronized planning,” he added.

Yusuf said a “targeted, deliberate and conscious” disinformation campaign was being constantly run by accounts in India and Afghanistan, some of which were linked to the state apparatus, in order to defame Pakistan in the international arena.

“I must remind you that Pakistan is a victim of the war in Afghanistan. We suffered more than 80,000 casualties with $150 billion loss in economy, therefore, stop blaming the victim,” he added.

The NSA emphasised that the actual failures were in the 20 years of what happened in Afghanistan. “This [propaganda] will not work because the kind of data we are showing you through forensics is irrefutable,” he said.

He added that many in positions of power at the global level were busy trying to shift the blame and create fake news about Pakistan, “but we will respond to it through data analysis”.

He also urged Pakistanis not to believe everything on social media, asking them to check and verify if they saw a trend going in a particular direction.

He assured the nation that the country was safe and would remain safe, saying the government would not shy away from calling out whoever was involved in defaming Pakistan.

He maintained that the security forces and state institutions of the country were vigilant and there was nothing alarming that should be worried about.

“No immediate neighbours of Afghanistan want any protracted conflict in the region. Pakistan will accept any politically resolved solution to the issue bearing full consensus of Afghan powers,” he said while responding to various media queries.

Responding to another query, he said Pakistan would expose the propaganda accounts generating anti-state content on regular basis.

The NSA shared a report of IPRI highlighted that the hashtag #SanctionPakistan was intermittently used since June 2016 mostly backed by Indian propaganda accounts where the situation changed in June 2021, when Afghan-supported accounts pushed the anti-state trend.

Giving a breakdown of a few trends allegedly based on disinformation, Chaudhry said the PTM had initiated 150 trends against Pakistan in the last two years consisting of 3.7 million tweets — and it takes more than 1,000 hours to do tweets at this scale, he added.

He said the PTM had also actively supported Baloch activism and on Aug 14, 2020, the hashtag ‘#BalochistanSolidarityDay’ was trended with massive support from India, with around 150,000 tweets posted with the hashtag by Indian activists in a day.

The minister went on to say that a few other trends under hashtags ‘#PTMExposedFakeTerrorism’, ‘#DaSangaAzadiDa’ and #BalochistanSolidarityDay had over 200,000 tweets backed by India, while other trends were also started under titles such as ‘Tyrant Pakistan Army’, ‘Army behind target killings’, and ‘Pakistan Army Kill Pashtuns’ to defame Pakistan. “These trends were initiated by PTM and supported by India,” he added.

He noted that a new hashtag was now being trended titled ‘#SanctionPakistan’, which had at least 800,000 tweets, 20,000 among them from the PTM. Afghan Vice President Amrullah Saleh, NSA Rehmatullah Andar and Defence Minister M. Bismillah also participated in these campaigns, he said.

Chaudhry said another “interesting trend” seen was that Wikipedia administrators from India were “designing campaigns for PTM and also running their pages on the website”.

The proof of such activity was shown in EU Disinfo Lab’s report titled ‘Indian Chronicles’ that exposed 845 websites created to propagate disinformation about Pakistan, he recalled.

The minister said there were several instances of misleading tweets like on the occasion of the death of Baloch activist Karima Baloch in Canada when it was alleged that ‘StateKilledKarimaBaloch’ but Canadian police later confirmed her death was a natural one. “But PTM did 20,000 tweets using that hashtag to target Pakistan,” he added.

with additional input from APP