Pakistan’s National Security Adviser Moeed Yusuf on Wednesday shared data of anti-Pakistan trends on social media that were run between 2019 and 2021 and said that origins of most of these trends were traced to India and Afghanistan.
Yusuf said these trends were aimed at running a “targeted, deliberate and conscious disinformation campaign against Pakistan”. He said the government through analysis and data would shed light on the “information warfare” Pakistan is faced with.
He said he wished to speak of Afghanistan in particular, where the Taliban and the government forces were at war against each other. He said that Pakistan government’s social media teams and think tanks worked extensively to gather evidence showing social media accounts “from Afghanistan and India being used repeatedly to malign Pakistan”.
Yusuf said that most recently a #SanctionPakistan trend spread online and it merited an investigation to see whether it was organic or not.
Besides this, the NSA said, there were efforts to blame Pakistan for the failures in the 20-year-long war in Afghanistan.
He said that as US troops began to withdraw from Afghanistan and the Taliban took control of cities and provincial capitals, “there was a growing narrative against Pakistan with the aim to blame all the failures on Pakistan and save those responsible”.
“And it is very unfortunate that some high level officials in the Afghan government are part of this, some of which have come forth as well,” he said.
He said “a lot of accounts have links to the state” and through India as well “a very well coordinated campaign is being run against Pakistan”.
“We will expose all these truths, not through fake news but through data and facts. We will form a narrative to tell the world what is being done with Pakistan.”
Timeline of disinformation and propaganda campaign to sabotage Afghan Peace Process, showing all the disinformation campaigns originated from #India and #Afghanistan 🇦🇫 🇮🇳
#BlameGameOnPakistan pic.twitter.com/r7tgOHlt4d
— Dr. Iftikhar Durrani (@IftikharDurani) August 11, 2021
