Why Pakistan is having so many posts removed from social media ?
In Pakistan, at a governmental level, social media are widely used to spread disinformation, hatred and xenophobia, if not violence. This has its mirror effect on the domestic population. The social and religious rigourous frame finds its exutory on social media, leading to additional abusive content infringing generally accepted community rules.
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The world’s leading short-form video platform TikTok removed more than 6.5 million videos in Pakistan, making it the third-ranked country in the world for the largest number of videos taken down between October 1, 2021, to December 30, 2021.
It should not be a surprise because of the general social media policy from top of state to Pakistani ordinary citizens.
On line hatred is a pillar of Pakistani governance.
Fake news, fake accounts, conspiracy theories, defamation, hate speech, cyberstalking, radical nationalism, religious extremism, xenophobia, law of Lynch, calumnious denunciations, defamation, influencers enrollment, Rawalpindi troll farms… have been promoted on social media, by Imran Khan’s team as a pillar of Pakistani governance.
All of this is packed under the name of the “5th-generation warfare.” It poisons a full country with more than 220 million of people, which nowadays considers that it is the appropriate way for “communication” or sharing a social issue.
Pakistan hatred authoritarian model can’t be questioned
Such a misuse of social media by Pakistan is not questioned thanks to media control, assassination of dissidents and, above all, the two perfect tools for tyranny: law against blasphemy and law against terrorism, diverted for political internal control and for promoting Islamist murders in other countries such as France.
Western countries are blind.
Meanwhile, most of the western analysts consider these criminal behaviors just being originated from Russia and look at only one direction. They still did not understand this lowcost warfare was of particular interest for all authoritarian states from the third world. The model is duplicated and flourishing.
See also: “Why are pro-Russian hate and trolls surging from the Third World?” (in French)
Frustration coming from gender segregation
Pakistan is not only the second largest populated Muslim country of the world. This is a land of patriarchy, of exacerbated puritanism and of strict gender segregation. This is a source of intense frustration, of dissimulation, of fantasm and of deviant behaviors, where frequently women and even kids are not more than sexual objects.
The abuse of children and then the recording and disseminating of images online have reached epidemic proportions… Those who produce the videos and photographs and the children who are subjected to the abuse are often those in developing countries…As Pakistanis know well, there are plenty of Pakistani paedophiles as well. The regular reports of even small toddlers and babies being abused and killed are a small indication of just how prevalent paedophilia is in Pakistan itself. While the problem exists, there is little effort to explain to parents and school officials the dangers it poses and to teach them how to combat the problem. There is even less information about how the internet, particularly the ‘dark net’, is used to distribute images of abused children or pornographic images involving children. — Rafia Zakaria, Dawn, October 2nd , 2019
Another consequence of gender segregation is the Pakistani rush on feminine social media users, especially is they are of white skin. This explains the incredible volume of followers western female influencers can be granted with in Pakistan. This also explains why these influencers are an integral part of Pakistan “fifth generation warfare”.
Everybody can create a fake young woman profile on Facebook and get quickly thousands of friends with numerous private message requests. Some videos attached to these messages are more than explicit. Clearly the goal of the flood of users is not friendship, not romance, but sex. Then, there is no need to search for more explanations about why so many Pakistani videos are dumped by social media.
