ISLAMABAD: National Security Adviser (NSA) Dr Moeed Yusuf said on Wednesday that a well-coordinated and calibrated social media campaign flaring anti-state trends on micro-blogging website Twitter was hatched to malign Pakistan in the prevailing tumultuous situation of Afghanistan.
Addressing a media conference along with Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry, the NSA launched a special analytical report prepared by Islamabad Policy Research Institute (IPRI) titled which deciphered the hashtags propagated to harm Pakistan’s image at the regional and global level.
Dr Moeed said Pakistan had presented a dossier to highlight India’s clandestine strides to damage Pakistan’s interest. The world, however, turned a blind eye to Indian terrorist activities against Pakistan as the dossier was sent to the states all over the world and the comity of nations expressed lull over it.
He said Pakistan was meticulously focusing the situation in Afghanistan and the think tanks under the National Security Division had worked tremendously to unearth the propaganda campaign on Twitter.
The NSA underscored that many Indian and Afghan accounts on Twitter ran a full-fledged campaign against Pakistan and mobilised anti-state trends to damage its role in the region.
“#SanctionPakistan trend on Twitter has gained huge momentum that created massive hype on the media. It has been perpetrated to attribute Afghan leadership’s failure on its soil with Pakistan,” Dr Moeed mentioned. He added that senior Afghan officials were involved whereas some of them were exposed during the campaign.
The NSA elucidated the entire propaganda campaign as a thematic contour based of five themes namely, discredit Pakistani government especially its army, give air to subnational movements that have no mass on ground both Pashtun and Baloch, direct targeting of China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), get Pakistan on the blacklist of Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and point all blames on Pakistan for chaos in Afghanistan.
He underlined that during the entire campaign 30 -40% Bot activities (Robotic activity for generating content on social media) were involved in generating anti-Pakistan trends. “Afghan and Indian official state accounts have been taking part in the propaganda campaign through synchronized planning,” he added.
He maintained that the security forces and state institutions of the country were vigilant and there was nothing alarming that should be worried about. “Pakistan will accept any politically resolved solution to the issue bearing full consensus of Afghan powers,” he said while responding to various media queries.
Responding to another query, he said Pakistan would expose the propaganda accounts generating anti-state content on regular basis. The NSA shared report of IPRI highlighted that the hashtag #SanctionPakistan was intermittently used since June 2016 mostly backed by Indian propaganda accounts where the situation changed in June 2021, when Afghan supported accounts pushed the anti-state trend.
