MM News

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz (PML-N) has slammed the government’s “Anti-State Trends Deep Analytics Report”, calling it “extremely misleading and shoddy”.

Addressing a press conference in Islamabad today (Friday), PML-N senior leader Shahid Khaqan Abbasi has asserted that the PTI-led federal government had declared its opponents ‘anti-state’ in the report for exposing its incompetence.

The PML-N leader claimed that a Canada-based company, which the government had cited as the source of the data, had confirmed that it had neither sold any data to Pakistan nor provided it in any capacity.

He said the Canadian firm made this revelation in a statement given to Geo News programme ‘Aaj Shahzeb Khanzada Kay Sath’. “This shows that the government in Pakistan either stole the data or made it up on its own,” he alleged.

He pointed out that the government had mentioned several hashtags and trends in the report, but “it didn’t elaborate the content written under the hashtags, whether it was in favour of Pakistan or against the current government’s corruption.”

Khaqan noted that a major part of the report targetted politicians and political parties with representation in the National Assembly and the Senate. “Political opponents are being labelled as anti-state and traitors merely for criticising incompetence of the government,” he added.

He said such reports are being published to divert the public’s attention from real issues like prevailing situation in Afghanistan. “The country’s problems could not be resolved through tweets and concocted reports,” he added.

Speaking on the occasion, PML-N leader Khurram Dastgir said hashtags were featured prominently in the report with no analysis on the tweets and their actual content. He said a female anchor’s name was also highlighted in the report as she had allegedly used one of the “anti-state hashtags” in her tweet.

He said out of the 135 pages of the report, 85 pages were based on screenshots devoid of any analysis. The PML-N leader noted that of the 668 tweets mentioned in the report, 145 were posted from three accounts that had 11,000 followers in total.

On Wednesday, the information ministry launched a 135-page “Deep Analytics Report” on “Anti-State Trends” showing the operation of social media accounts from Afghanistan and India with backing from elements within Pakistan to malign the country.

On the occasion, Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry had said government teams had analysed Twitter trends from June 2019 to August 2021 and “it transpired that India led the top trends against Pakistan and the biggest player which helped India was PTM (Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement) and its activists.

The minister also said, “Whether knowingly or unknowingly, representatives of the JUI-F and PML-N also tweeted under a hashtag created to spread misinformation.”