In April 1869, William H. Mumler, an American photographer who claimed that he could capture ghosts and spirits in his pictures, was brought to trial for fraud. In one picture, a woman sits on a chair, and on her lap is a faint image of a baby that reminds you of Casper the Ghost.

Mumler’s clients, among others, were loved ones of people who had died in the American Civil War and were looking for closure. His most famous photograph was one which allegedly captured the ghost of Abraham Lincoln — and his widowed wife, who sits on a chair, wearing all black.

Mumler was accused of breaking into the houses of grieving families to steal pictures of their dead relatives, to be used for ‘spirit photography.’ But he was acquitted. The New York World, a newspaper published in the city from 1860 to 1931, later published a column that said:

“Who, henceforth, can trust the accuracy of a photograph… What ravage will this possibility make of private reputation, and what confusion entail on the historian of future times. Photographs have been treasured in a belief that… they could not lie, but here is a revelation that they may be made to lie with a most deceiving exactness.”

Could you tell, minus the ancient English, that this column was printed in 1869, and not in Pakistan in 2024? A new, post-social media Pakistan, where judges, politicians and the state express horror at the scale of disinformation against them? That nobodies on social media have the gall to criticise them? The Pakistan of 2024 where we have invented the term “digital terrorists?”

Pakistan has always had a complex relationship with truth and power and, now, social media has highlighted the state’s uneasy relationship with technology. Is social media truly the culprit for society’s anxieties or merely the latest scapegoat in a long history of disinformation?

THE DIGITAL RUBICON

Social media was the underdog in Pakistan two decades ago, taken for granted, ignored. When a few journalists and activists would report on cybercrime and abuse against women and children, the government did not care. Entrepreneurs and freelancers were on their own.

But now, social media hovers over those who exercise authority — parents, politicians, clerics — as an enormous threat, one that must be contained. And if you hear these people talk enough, you might believe the world, and Pakistan especially, is going through a cataclysmic change that is not just destroying the truth, but a human being’s fundamental ability to know truth from lies.

In a video shared on X (formerly Twitter) in December 2021, a man can be seen accusing a beverage company salesman of blasphemy. The blogger, Imran Noshad Khan, who posted the video, asks the man what the issue is, and the man shows him the QR code imprinted on a beverage bottle, which he insists has an Islamic prophet’s name written within it. “But this is a QR code,” says Noshad. “No! Either the company removes this mark, or we go to war,” the man says. “I will burn their vehicles.”

In science, it might be called a high pattern-recognition ability. Those exceptional at maths, coding and music are known to have this. But if you do not understand how the human brain works, and are in Pakistan, you end up spotting blasphemy in a QR code.

Pakistan has had a complicated relationship with technology. Clerics — famous ones and those from small towns — opposed TV and cable when it first arrived here, claimed photography to be un-Islamic, and labelled loud speakers as spawns of Satan.

In some households, telephones are still considered devices that can corrupt a woman’s morality. The gender divide in connectivity in Pakistan is one of the highest in the world, because men don’t want their women to have smartphones (and not just because of poverty, according to international reports).

What is it about anything new and modern that it elicits in people paranoia and the primal fear of the unknown? Why do social media and smart phones do that to the men in our country, at home or in the government? How is that in a country with issues such as poverty, rape and abuse, crime and violence, the state has made social media the object of its obsession?

It is because social media, to them, is expansive, limitless, uncontrollable. It may disinform people, but it also fact-checks claims by politicians and officials in mere minutes, unlike previously, when we had to wait for decades before a history event would make it to the books. It took the judiciary 50 years to acknowledge there were flaws in the Bhutto judgement, but social media has allowed people to analyse and comment on high-profile cases minute by minute.

And while doxing and hate speech are real issues, it is the rapid shift of power away from traditional institutions that gives people in power anxiety and uncertainty. They fret at the polarisation and chaos in society that will ensue due to this. One might ask: what was it like before social media supposedly upended power structures?

“…this narrative presupposes a false history in which institutions were unproblematically organised around enlightenment epistemic values,” writes Joshua Habgood-Coote, in his paper ‘Deepfakes and the Epistemic Apocalypse.’

“It doesn’t take a lot of historical inquiry to show that this is false. The history of propaganda, white supremacy, and European Imperial projects provide us with rich examples of institutions organised around the production of ignorance,” he writes.

Since Pakistan’s inception, the state has been known for imposing censorship, and producing and encouraging narratives that term any criticism anti-state. Widespread political victimisation continues; in the past journalists have been flogged for telling the truth, and young women, such as Jehan Mina, who were raped, were handed out punishments for fornication instead of receiving justice.

But in a reply to the Sindh High Court on the ban on X earlier this year, the interior ministry said that it wants to promote the “responsible use of social media” that upholds our moral values, and so it must ban X.

When we say we want people to uphold our moral values on social media, what standards are we exactly referring to?

SELF-EVIDENT TRUTHS

In Pakistan, we are taught that some statements told to us by the state are self-evident truths — truths like the sky is blue or 2+2 equals 4. Unlike our ancestors, we do not require hours spent observing, hypothesising and deducting truths — we just know.

But in other parts of the world, thinkers and philosophers apply reason, logic and scientific inquiry to explore our relationship with truth, free speech and technology.

How did we perceive, observe, believe before social media? Does technology inform us or does it destroy our fundamental ability to discern truth from lies? Was the world better before social media? Or before TV, radio and satellites?

Consider the video: a century ago, it was superior evidence, the final evidence, to verify events of a crime. Circumstantial evidence would matter; but if there was a video or a picture, it would basically be the end of the argument. Human beings learned to rely on this kind of technology as an “epistemic backstop” — the final truth of the different proofs, writes Habgood-Coote.

This is because, the paper says quoting various authors, the video ended our dependence solely on the testimony of another person, who could be lying, saying something under pressure, or influenced by their moral or political ideas.

We started to see technology as mostly positive. We started to believe that any information from these pre-internet era technologies are primary sources of knowledge. This changed in the age of social media and the invention of photo and video software.

Now, we don’t know whether the information is true or manipulated, and who carried out the manipulation. There is a widespread belief that the recent polls results were manipulated. But are all the Form-45s posted on X by the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI), also notorious for disinformation, genuine? Or should we wait for a reliable media house, with experienced journalists, to confirm this?

We are back to where we started: depending on a fellow fallible human being, instead of the ‘incorruptible’ technology. And this is what makes people anxious.

“[W]hen we rely on an instrument, we rely on the social practices relating to the production, operation, and maintenance of that instrument,” writes Habgood-Coote. This means that, even when the video was considered a superior form of evidence, it still needed to be checked for accuracy, its origin, and the place of its production.

Why can’t we apply the same reasoning to social media? International standards do exactly that. There are widely accepted definitions, separately, for misinformation, disinformation and hate speech, and different measures to deal with each of them, balancing free speech with civil rights.

DISINFORMATION AND DISTRACTIONS

“Take the money. Give an interview,” tweeted Hina Parvez Butt, a Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) parliamentarian, in May, with a screenshot of an interview of former prime minister Imran Khan with an international media outlet. The post went viral and people were quick to mock her for getting it wrong.

“This Pakistani politician from the governing party is pushing a conspiracy theory that I was ‘paid’ to do my interview with Imran Khan,” responded renowned British-American broadcaster Mehdi Hassan on X, who interviewed Khan for his digital platform, Zeteo. “‘Paid’ on the post below means it’s a post only for paid subscribers to Zeteo. Imagine being this ignorant and conspiratorial … and elected!”

While the PTI was unmatched in Pakistan in its social media campaigns and coordinated disinformation, the PML-N seems to be catching up. The PTI government had created a FakeNewsBuster account on X, that would mostly, and often erroneously, “fact-check” news items that criticised the party.

The PML-N has taken it up several notches and brought a defamation law, which — while passed by the provincial legislature of Punjab — somehow applies to anyone in Pakistan who “defames” a person based in Punjab.

A study by the Centre for News Technology and Innovation, an independent global policy research centre, found that just seven of the 32 pieces of legislation in 31 countries, including Pakistan, explicitly defined what fake news actually is.

“Fourteen of the 32 policies clearly designate the government with the authority to decide what is or is not “fake news”… The remaining 18 policies provide either vague or no language about who has that control, ceding it to the government by default,” said the report, which analysed policies that were proposed or enacted between 2020 and 2023.

Whipping up frenzy around fake news and disinformation also helps distract from the fact that states are behind some of the most coordinated and consistent disinformation campaigns.

This includes disinformation by India against Pakistan, reported by the EU Disinfo Lab, or US disinformation against Chinese vaccines during the pandemic, reported by a recent Reuters investigation.

Pakistan does it too, with its own citizens. “[T]he team observed a high level of involvement in spreading disinformation among officials from Balochistan,” said a report by iVerify, a fact-checking project being run by the Centre of Excellence in Journalism (CEJ) at the Institute of Business Administration (IBA) in Karachi. This includes claims that Pakistan has the least number of missing persons in South Asia, and false claims about Baloch protest leaders, such as Mahrang Baloch, the report said.

While countries such as Pakistan are quick to bring legislation, they do not use basic measures, such as rebutting viral rumours that regularly affect public peace, such as blasphemy accusations.

“To verify… [we] had assigned a reporter to get in touch with the local administration, who neither cooperated nor gave an authentic answer,” the report said. “[In addition,] officials of the Election Commission… just kept handing the issue over to different departments.”

The government has not partnered with any organisation working on mass information literacy campaigns, says Ayesha Khalid of Media Matters for Democracy, a media literacy and development entity based in Islamabad. Yet, the same government is spending billions on surveillance technology to monitor content on social media.

The PML-N also co-opts the very language of rights activists and experts: the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (Peca) was for the protection of women, it says and, according to Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz, the defamation bill will protect religious minorities.

During the PTI government, Maryam Nawaz claimed that secret video cameras were set up in the bathroom of her prison cell, during her detention by the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) in a corruption case. “I will expose those responsible behind this when the time is right,” Maryam had told a political rally.

But after she and her party came into power, the government officially allowed the country’s spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), to intercept phone calls and communication apps.

THE BIG, FAT PROPAGANDIST

Various recent studies on the psychology and motivations of people who go above and beyond to intentionally spread lies on the internet, point to the same factors that society has dealt with forever: people and states convinced their political or religious beliefs are superior, that they are on the right side of history, and that lies and war are a necessary means to an end.

If there is nothing new to it, why do we claim that propaganda is not a fundamental truth about being human? Or that it is technology that is the major culprit? And if some people are meant to be propagandists, what about others that blindly follow? Is there a way to address their inherent biases that leads them to believe these lies in the first place?

“[T]here are a number of scalable interventions that demonstrably boost the public’s resistance to misinformation, such as media literacy tips… and inoculation,” says the 2023 paper ‘Misinformation and the Epistemic Integrity of Democracy’, published in ScienceDirect.

Inoculation involves showing people brief educational materials, such as videos, which explain the techniques used by disinformation actors, so that people are “inoculated” against them.

In 2023, Niloufer Siddiqui, who teaches at the University of Albany, and her colleagues conducted a study, titled ‘Misinformation and Support for Vigilantism.’ They found that telling participants in India and Pakistan that various news channels had investigated and found a rumour to be false led them to believe the rumour less. “It also made them less likely to support any violence on the basis of that rumour.”

Dozens of such studies and projects around the globe prove that misinformation can be addressed through well-thought-out measures based on evidence. Moreover, the claim that people have recently “departed from truth” assumes that we lived in a well-ordered state of affairs before, writes University of Essex lecturer Lorna Finlayson, in her 2019 paper ‘What to do with Post-Truth.’

“But once we investigate these claims, we are forced to acknowledge that things were not so well-ordered after all… otherwise, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”

The writer is a freelance journalist and researcher. A former computer engineer, she reports on cybercrime, disinformation and human rights

Published in Dawn, EOS, August 18th, 2024