Pakistan
NSA Yusuf says Afghan and Indian social media accounts being used to defame Pakistan
Islamabad: National Security Adviser Moeed Yusuf said Wednesday that social media accounts originated from Afghanistan and India are being used to defame Pakistan.
He said the propaganda against Pakistan is being hatched on social media as Afghan authorities had failed to prevent sweeping territorial gains made by the Taliban.
Flanked by Federal Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry, Yusuf told a presser that Pkaistan regretted the global silence in response to India propagating disinformation against Pakistan.
But the NSA said the government would continue presenting analytics-based data to show the information warfare being faced by Pakistan.
"Afghanistan has a volatile situation now, but let me tell you Afghan and Indian accounts are being used to malign Pakistan," he added.
'Sanction Pakistan' was widely trended on Twitter to create a narrative against the country, Moeed said.
He told media that attempts are in progress to blame Pakistan for Afghanistan's failures. "As the Taliban offensive is increasing, there are campaigns to shift its blame on Pakistan."
Yusuf said senior Afghan officials, including his Afghan counterpart, were involved in such campaigns, adding that the government would expose everything through data and not fake news. "We won't expose fake news through fake news," he commented.
He then proceeded to show a few slides, one of which was a timeline from 2019 onwards, and others, which showed how, as matters grew more intense in Afghanistan, hashtags against Pakistan popped up.
The Digital Media Wing of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting launched a "Deep Analytics Report" on "Anti-State Trends".
The 135-page report covering "PTM, Political Parties, Indian and Fake News Nexus" dissects what it terms anti-Pakistan trends from 2019 to 2021.
Yusuf says five top themes used by the elements involved in the propaganda are:
-Discredit the Pakistani government and especially Pakistan Army
-Fan sub-nationalism
-Target the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC)
-Keep Pakistan on the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) grey list
-Blame Pakistan for all the chaos in Afghanistan
G5iO analytics disclose smear campaign against Pakistan
A sustained disinformation and propaganda campaign by India and Afghanistan to sabotage the Afghan peace process and target Pakistan, has been uncovered, showing the extent of the fifth generation warfare.
According to data analytics conducted by the G5iO – a think tank studying the cyber world for data and analytics a concentrated campaign was launched on multiple social media platforms with the extensive use of bots, coordinated network behavior and fake news pushed across multiple SM platforms.
The findings were echoed by the National Security Adviser Moeed Yusuf who in a press conference said Pakistan was facting an onslaught of the Information war, through propaganda on social media accounts, and was being run from the office of the Afghan National Security Adviser.
“Pakistan is being blamed for its 20-year failure in Afghanistan,” he said and pointed that through the hybrid war Pakistan’s state institutions and the CPEC were being targetted. He said one of the targets was also to “put Pakistan in the blacklist of the FATF.”
He pointed that 3.7 million tweets were posted against Pakistan which trended for 1000 hours, in collusion with the Baloch separatists under the patronage of Indian National Investigation Agency.
Pakistan has repeatedly pointed how India and several other countries were engaged in the fifth generation warfare (5GW) against it, a fact that came to the fore with the shocking disclosures made by the EU Disinfo Lab.
The G5iO pointed that the frequency and intensity of these campaigns increased dramatically over the last 3 months once, particularly after the announcement of the final withdrawal date of the United States of America and as the Taliban gained military victories.
The latest hashtag #sanctionPakistan has been used over 730,000 times, according to the data from a social media insight company, Talkwalker. Around 37 percent of those tweets originated from Afghanistan.
The data collected from May 2020 to Aug 2021 indicates key narratives, networks and user accounts running disinformation operations. A comparative analysis focused on online hashtag activity with offline political and regional security events.
It was noted that artificial activity was generated from accounts engaging in platform manipulation and were recently created to push inorganic content.
Despite efforts by Pakistan to maintain a conciliatory tone relations with Afghanistan have soured over the past few months. Pakistan’s offer to Afghanistan for a Peace Conference earlier this month was rejected, while the Afghan diplomats were recalled by President Ashraf Ghani over an alleged abduction attempt of its ambassador’s daughter. Pakistan has refuted and termed it a staged attempt to malign the country.