Each morning, in the last few months, journalist Shahzeb Jillani would wake up to a barrage of notifications on Twitter. Jillani, who has a following of over 14,000 users on the micro-blogging site, was usually not alarmed by the scurrilous trolling and abuse. But on March 24, he admits, “something changed.” That was when he posted a tweet criticising the decision to decorate a senior military intelligence officer “widely accused of political engineering” during the July 2018 election.
“I could feel the pressure building up. The tone [of trolls] had become extensively threatening and specific,” he tells Eos during an interview. Among the 197 replies to Jillani’s tweet is a swarm of suspicious accounts hurling terms akin to ‘traitor’ and questioning his loyalty to the country.
It was the attention to detail that Jillani found unsettling.
According to him, a majority of the accounts engaging with him after that tweet had a profile picture of the Pakistan flag, a numeric Twitter handle and between 20 to 25 followers on an average.
Referring to one of these tweets, he recalls: “One of the comments tagged DG ISPR [Director General Inter Services Public Relations] suggesting to him that if they can take care of other TV journalists by getting them fired from their jobs, why can’t they take care of me?” Another troll warned him that he would soon lose his job at Dunya News channel.
A few weeks later, Jillani was, in fact, sacked from his job.
Journalists in Pakistan who dissent from the official narrative are feeling the brunt not only of the state and its bad laws. A more insidious form of censorship is being used to silence them online
On April 8, while on his way back from a reporting assignment in Thar, Jillani’s phone buzzed incessantly with an onslaught of message alerts. Ironically, it was through Twitter that he learned that the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) had filed a case against him on charges of cyber-terrorism, which carries a maximum jail sentence of 14 years.
According to the First Investigation Report, Jillani was accused by a viewer of “articulating defamatory remarks against the respected institutions of Pakistan”, a crime under the Pakistan Electronic Crimes Act (Peca) 2016.
The case is based on the complaint by a self-described “loyal citizen”, who has also filed various petitions challenging civilian political leaders in the past.
The complainant alleged that Jillani was toeing the “line of foreign agencies on social media and had also been blogging in order to implement his agenda against the sovereignty of Pakistan”.
The complainant further claimed that the act of the ‘suspect’ was “in collusion with the enemy countries that seems to intense [sic] conspiracy, which directly or indirectly damaged and defamed the State of Pakistan by casting audacious aspersions against sacred institutions.”
The statement of the FIA cybercrime reporting centre in Karachi mentions that, during the course of the inquiry, it was found that “Jillani had — with criminal intent and ulterior motives and without any lawful justification — made sarcastic, derogatory, disrespectful remarks and used defamatory language against Pakistan, the Election Commission of Pakistan, and the armed force [sic].”
The charge sheet includes printouts of screenshots of specific tweets posted by Jillani.
In his statement to the FIA, Jillani maintained that his duty as a journalist demands that “wherever I become aware of any wrongdoing on part of any public institution or public functionary, I must point it out.
“One may agree or disagree with [the] criticism but not [with] my constitutional right to criticise. No institution or individual involved in politics can claim to be above criticism,” he stated.
However, according to the complainant, Jillani’s actions “are tantamount to creating a sense of fear, panic, insecurity in government institutions, [the] general public and society”.
Consequently, he contended, besides cyber-terrorism, the investigative reporter — who has worked previously for the BBC and Deutsche Welle — be charged for hate speech and offence against “dignity of a natural person.”
“The purpose of these conspiracy-themed accounts is to drown out critical voices. They wanted Jillani to go offline, and he did,” Jillani says dejectedly.
Since the FIA case, the journalist has been advised to refrain from social media activity.
In the latest update till the filing of this report, the FIA has withdrawn the cognisable charges (cyber-terrorism) as well as the charge of hate speech in its final investigation report submitted in the court. However, the case is still under trail for charges of defamation under Section 20 of Peca.
According to Farieha Aziz, co-founder of digital rights group Bolo Bhi, various irregularities go unchecked under the law.
“The FIR against Shahzeb is exactly what we said Peca would be used for,” says Aziz. “From arbitrary summons and inquiries, we’ve seen people slapped with charges of cyber-terrorism, hate speech and, in particular, criminal defamation — i.e. Section 20, [which pertains to the] dignity of a natural person.”
Exacerbating misuse of the law are the vaguely phrased provisions of Peca. “If you look at the language of the law, Section 20 mentions “aggrieved person”. The complainant must be an individual. An institution cannot be an aggrieved person and an officer or another cannot, on its behalf, invoke this section of the law,” she points out.
“Then, if you look at the FIRs in other [Peca] cases, the FIA has been adding cognisable sections of the Pakistan Penal Code [PPC] to acquire power to arrest — and, in some cases, also ATA [the Anti-Terrorism Act]. They require warrants to search and seize devices — however, those summoned for inquiries and detained have reported their devices have been seized while at the station,” she points out.
For Jillani and those accused under the law, regardless of the merits of the cases, the hearings go on.
Such harassment of dissidents and journalists who don’t fall in line is nothing new. But what is new are the tools being employed to enforce silence. Aside from the use of poorly drafted new technology laws, there are also more insidious ways, which involve online bullying and smearing through targeted campaigns on social media.
Anatomy of a campaign
Pakistan’s Twitter landscape has a comparatively dense share of users, and the influence of propaganda accounts and coordinated networks on national discourse has intensified recently.
For troll groups aligned with a populist narrative, group chats in apps such as WhatsApp are active all day long, discussing potential targets to abuse, threaten or intimidate. They scour Twitter feeds of journalists and political activists critical of the state narrative, and celebrate small victories in terms of virality, retweets and disbursement of content.
On an average day on local Twitter, it is normal to come across two to three hashtags or ‘trending’ topics. Whereas normally hashtags ‘trend’ through popular engagement of users with the topics, in Pakistan these often indicate manufactured campaigns. The content of these campaigns is often replicated, and a scroll down the hashtag feed almost always leads to a user (ideally with a large following) tweeting the merchant code: “Grab your keyboards and start trending.”
Who are these hashtag merchants, and what motivates them?
There are three types of networks stifling critics on the platform: those who trend hashtags to augment the pro-government narrative; those who actively engage with journalists and activists critical of the government; and those who monitor and select ‘targets’.
Last month, 10 journalists were targeted with coordinated smear campaigns online. The trends which were listed among top trends in Pakistan — accompanied by abuse, defamatory content and doctored images — specifically focused on journalists questioning the government’s policies. The coordinated network of pro-government supporters accused them of corruption, of taking bribes, bias and of spreading fake news.
Earlier, in December 2018 journalist Raza Rumi, then editor at The Daily Times, was the target of an online campaign against him after he published an editorial by an Ahmadi author in criticism of an online influencer. “Between December 31 and January 2, more than 2,000 tweets were sent out against me,” says Rumi. “This barrage of abuse and defamatory content has been and can be a threat to real life employment. This is preemptive harassment, that often leads to dangerous consequences. It not only encourages self-censorship online but also influences editorial policy.”