In Pakistan today, a rumour does not need a newsroom, a microphone or even a credible source. All it needs is a smartphone, a provocative caption and a few thousand willing forwards can do the job. A shaky clip from a market, a school, a hospital corridor or a traffic dispute can get a public verdict before anyone bothers to establish what actually happened. WhatsApp groups turn speculation into certainty, Facebook pages pass instant judgments, and X (Twitter) provides outrage by the bucketful within minutes. By the time the facts arrive, the story may have already travelled across cities, languages and borders.
It is not simply a problem of fake news. It is a problem of how a society understands information and responds to the rapid digitalisation that is impacting every domain of human life due to its decentralising characteristics, with expanding access. The country has built a vast network of digital consumers without giving enough attention to the civic and intellectual skills required to navigate it. In a context where speed beats verification, Pakistan is not merely consuming news differently; it is increasingly allowing fragments, captions and algorithms to decide what counts as truth. We have handed ourselves the most powerful broadcasting system in human history without teaching ourselves how to use it.
The commercial launch of the internet in Pakistan took place in the mid-1990s. Digicom was the first to provide commercial internet in the country, starting with services from Karachi. The social web expanded globally with the introduction of Facebook in 2004, followed by YouTube in 2005 and Twitter in 2006. Three decades later, Pakistan, with a population of around 256 million, has approximately 117 million internet users and nearly 80 million social media user identities.
The numbers reflect a significant expansion of connectivity. They reveal little about whether users can identify manipulated content, evaluate competing claims or recognise the difference between evidence and speculation. This is where Pakistan’s digital transformation deserves greater scrutiny. While access and connectivity have been propagated as measures of progress, media literacy remains a peripheral concern in much of the public conversation. A smartphone gives its user access to information, an audience and the ability to influence public perceptions. That power comes with responsibility. The state and regulators, schools and universities, newsrooms, technology platforms and ordinary citizens all have a role in determining whether digital spaces support informed debate or reward reckless amplification.
It raises a question whether Pakistan can afford to treat media literacy as an optional educational exercise in an environment where a viral post can influence public opinion before a professional newsroom has verified its contents. Several countries have begun addressing online harm through regulatory frameworks. For instance, the European Union has adopted the Digital Services Act under which the digital intermediary platforms are liable for systemic risks and minors benefit from special protection. Britain’s Online Safety Act places child-risk assessments and safety duties on platforms. Australia is now requiring major social media sites to take reasonable steps to prevent under-16s from using their accounts. These frameworks have generated debates over free expression, privacy, enforcement and the role of technology companies. Their broader relevance for Pakistan lies in the recognition that digital access creates responsibilities for institutions and platforms.
Pakistan has also chosen the path of regulation. The 2025 amendments to PECA introduced a new offence for spreading “false or fake” information online, with a penalty of up to 3 years’ imprisonment. But regulation alone cannot make judgment. Human Rights Watch has called the amendment’s “vague and overbroad language to describe it subjectively as information that could cause ‘fear, panic, disorder or unrest.’” It warned that the amendment “neither protects the public from legitimate online security threats nor respects fundamental human rights”, thereby putting legitimate expression at risk. A democracy cannot choose between misinformation and censorship. It must learn to fight the former without normalising the latter. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) called it a “deeply concerned” development which is “likely to become yet another means of targeting political workers, human rights defenders, journalists and dissidents by effectively penalizing criticism of state institutions.”
Such concerns deserve serious consideration. A government seeking to combat misinformation must also demonstrate that its regulatory powers will not become instruments for suppressing criticism or controlling public debate. The answer to misinformation cannot rest entirely with the police, courts or regulatory authorities. A society that has not developed the ability to assess information will remain vulnerable, regardless of how many laws it passes.
Within Pakistan’s evolving digital governance framework, the missing bridge is media and information literacy. UNESCO and Pakistan’s Higher Education Commission have collaborated on a draft Media and Information Literacy course for university media programs, while a national dialogue in 2025 proposed integrating such education from the primary through the tertiary level. This needs to move from workshop discussion to classroom reality. Every university student, not just a journalism major, should have basic media and digital literacy to understand information sources, distinguish between misinformation and disinformation, and decide whether to amplify new information. As such, Pakistan’s universities have an opportunity to develop a generation that understands information as a responsibility. The question is whether policymakers and educational institutions will treat that task with the urgency it deserves.
The problem is not limited to a lack of verification. It is also embedded in the way digital platforms shape attention. Guy Debord’s notion of ‘society of the spectacle’ offers a useful perspective on public life increasingly mediated through images, dramatic representations and spectacle. Social media platforms intensify this dynamic by rewarding content that attracts attention and generates emotional reactions. Add to this what psychologists call ‘morbid curiosity’, our evident willingness to seek out information that involves violence, death and harm, and we have a potent form of drama-driven news consumption. A dramatic image may be authentic but presented without context. A genuine incident may be accompanied by a false caption. An old video may be circulated as evidence of a new event. The audience sees something real and is then encouraged to believe a story that has not been established. This is where the distinction between witnessing and understanding becomes essential.
Worse, repetition is capable of substituting for proof. In a 2023 study in the journal Cognition, Valentina Vellani and colleagues found that repeated misinformation was rated as more accurate and more likely to be shared, the illusory truth effect. Sometimes a claim doesn’t need better evidence to be believable; it just needs to be heard enough times. Kuran and Sunstein’s idea of an ‘availability cascade’ explains how a perception can become increasingly credible through repetition and apparent widespread belief. The more people hear and repeat the claim, the more its exposure can begin to replace evidence.
Pakistan’s digital information environment also has implications beyond its borders. In this age of digital diplomacy, a domestic clip can be turned into an international narrative within minutes. While it is true that such instances could be presented as evidence of institutional failure, social disorder, or state misconduct before their origins and context have been established, the answer cannot be to conceal embarrassing incidents in the name of national reputation. Legitimate criticism should not be dismissed as an attack on the country, and neither should an unverified claim be defended merely because it aligns with a preferred political position. No country, including Pakistan, deserves a population that accepts every official statement without question. A democratic sociopolitical setup needs digital and media-literate citizens who can question institutions and do not accept every unverified claim as fact.
It needs to be understood that every smartphone is a publishing platform, enabling users to become publishers and bypass traditional channels of dissemination. But what differentiates societies is how effectively their governments implement measures to empower their citizens with avenues to acquire skills and how well their citizens adopt these technologies for the greater good of society. As such, Pakistani policymakers need to understand that the country’s digital reputation will not be protected by silence or censorship, but strengthened by empowered citizens. Digital access has already transformed Pakistan’s information environment. The next challenge is to ensure that media literacy catches up before misinformation becomes the default language of public life.
