Dawn: India has provided no proof to substantiate this claim, but the accusation is a reminder of an often-overlooked reality: In Pakistan, the medium has a menacing side and often displays extremist sentiment.
Most discussions about the social media sphere in Pakistan describe it as a last redoubt of liberalism. With liberal space rapidly shrinking in Pakistani society, the narrative goes, the country’s outspoken supporters of tolerance and diversity are flocking to Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and other forms of social media to voice opinions no longer safe to espouse offline.
There is undoubtedly some truth to this view. Some of the most visible personalities on social media are Pakistan’s liberal journalists (many of them writers and editors affiliated with English-language newspapers), human rights advocates, and NGO leaders. They denounce sectarian violence, circulate petitions calling for less media censorship, and spotlight stories about state repression and moral policing long before they receive coverage from Pakistan’s traditional media.
However, as I emphasise in a new study on Pakistan’s social media (published by the Norwegian Peacebuilding Resource Center, or NOREF), this is not the full story. Pakistan’s social media world is populated by many decidedly non-liberal actors. The Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) are active on Twitter, and numerous other militant outfits have Facebook accounts. Hizb-ut-Tahrir, a global Islamist group pledging non-violence yet calling for the conquest of India and destruction of Israel, is banned in Pakistan but compensates for its lack of public demonstrations by spreading its ideology via mobile phone, Facebook, and Twitter.
An eye-opening study by journalist Wajahat S. Khan reveals how extremist social media users in Pakistan generate counter-narratives to compete with the messages promoted by their liberal counterparts. Khan analyses new media responses to the assassination of Salman Taseer, and makes some unsettling discoveries: New Facebook pages in honor of Taseer’s killer, Mumtaz Qadri, appeared simultaneously with those formed to commemorate Taseer; Facebook users urged each other to use Qadri’s face as their profile photos; and Millat Facebook (an Islamist version of Facebook) became a prominent venue for pro-Qadri commentary.
Categories: Asia, Behaviour, Discrimination, Double Standard, Hypocrisy, Pakistan