19 Mar 24 | Asia and Pacific, News and features, Pakistan
The first time Gharidah Farooqi became a target of tech-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) was in 2014. She was working as a reporter at Samaa, a private Pakistani television channel, and covering cricketer-turned politician Imran Khan’s anti-government protest that set off from the eastern city of Lahore in Punjab province to the country’s capital, Islamabad.
“I was there 24/7 on the ground and would go to the hotel just to take a few hours of rest,” she told Index.
“My morphed photos from the field coverage were posted on social media along with sexist and vulgar comments,” recalled Farooqi, who is currently working as a senior anchor at GTV, another private Pakistani TV channel.
“For the longest of time, I ignored it, but not in [my] wildest imagination had I foreseen a Frankenstein in the making,” said Farooqi, adding that people were not used to seeing a woman reporter in the field.
“For them it was just shughal [making fun] of me,” she said.
A decade later, the attacks have not stopped. In fact, they have taken on an even uglier and more dangerous shape through generative artificial intelligence (AI), which uses models to create new content.
“Generative AI is making TFGBV even more difficult to address,” explained Nighat Dad, a lawyer and internet activist who runs the not-for-profit organisation Digital Rights Foundation (DRF), which helps Pakistanis fight against online harassment.
She said that this technology gives the creator power to change the original image, text, audio or video very quickly, in a way that makes it hard to identify whether it is an original or a deepfake, terming it “photoshopping in a more sophisticated manner”.
For Farooqi, “the period between the calm and chaos” is so short, she barely gets any respite. Along with the organised campaign by political parties’ supporters, there is a daily barrage of abuse on her social media pages, she said, adding: “It is not mere trolling; trolling is a very harmless word compared to what I’m facing.”
She’s not the only one to have had a taste of this form of violence.
“The prime targets are of course women, although a few men have also been targeted,” said Farooqi. Many have reached out to her, “mostly for emotional support” and to ask her how to seek legal help.
In her experience, female colleagues have always supported each other, and supported her in particular, for which she says she’s “eternally grateful”.
“Gharidah faces [more] attacks than any other journalist,” said Dad, who is constantly being contacted for help by women journalists.
The DRF has a helpline and a resource kit that offers a list of places offering help. Between January and November 2023, 22 female and 14 male journalists reached out to DRF with complaints including blasphemy accusations, abusive messages, bullying, blackmailing, censorship, defamation, GBV, impersonation, online stalking, phishing, sexual harassment and threats of physical violence.
While Farooqi has learnt to navigate the legal mechanisms and lodge complaints, not everyone will be as astute in warding off cyber harassment.
The Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act 2016 “carves out certain offences such as morphing of pictures or videos etc., which is done using tech tools”, according to Farieha Aziz, a cybercrime expert and co-founder of Bolo Bhi, an advocacy forum for digital rights.
But the “manner in which online harassment cases are executed and dealt with, despite complaints being lodged and arrests being made, remains problematic due to a lack of priority by the Federal Investigation Agency [FIA]. Either these women do not hear back or there is no progress on complaints they've made, at various stages of the case,” Aziz said.
After filing complaints eight times, Farooqi said, it was only on her most recent complaint (made last month), that any action was taken by the FIA when her personal details – her home address and her telephone number – were made public.
“I started getting anonymous calls and messages threatening me with rape and even death warnings. It was the first time that the agency took swift action and got the posts deleted,” she said.
The Karachi-based Centre of Excellence in Journalism has produced a safety kit for women journalists “on how to protect themselves and where and how to report,” Aziz told Index, adding that they also provide counselling.
“There has been pervasive and persistent online harassment, sexualised and otherwise gendered disinformation faced by women journalists in Pakistan, with many being threatened with physical assault and offline violence. We’ve witnessed multiple incidents of female journalists' private information being leaked online with what we can say are well-planned and directed efforts to silence them and [which] resulted in stalking and offline harassment,” said a statement by the Pakistan-based Network of Journalists for Digital Rights earlier this month, condemning the use of TFGBV and generative AI to attack female journalists.
Farooqi considers generative AI as yet another weapon to silence and subdue women journalists. Claiming to be a woman with “nerves of steel”, she said she has to be thick-skinned to be able to survive these attacks. To keep sane, she advises people to never engage with attackers.
19 Feb 24 | Asia and Pacific, News and features, Pakistan
The media in Pakistan, a 240-million strong nation, has seldom been free ever since it removed its colonial shackles from the British Raj in 1947. Spates of draconian laws to curb the press were imposed in the three martial law periods, as well as during the democratic governments, spanning the 77-year life of this South Asian nation. These attacks reached new heights in recent weeks, as Pakistan voted in a tense general election. Critical voices from press and civil society were strangled. The military establishment tried to control the media narrative, while internet blackouts became commonplace. And yet despite this, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) backed independent candidates bagged the largest number of seats in the national and provincial assemblies, in an upset for the military establishment.
“This is peoples’ reaction against the actions,” Mazhar Abbas, a senior award-winning journalist and anchor, told Index. “This is an eye-opener for those who think the suppression could serve their purpose.”
Independent candidates backed by the PTI, the party of Imran Khan, won 93 seats in Pakistan’s National Assembly or lower house of 264 seats, but will not be allowed to form a government as they were forced to run as individuals. Parties of thrice-prime minister Nawaz Sharif secured 75 seats followed by the Pakistani Peoples Party (PPP) with 54 seats. Given these votes the most likely outcome is a coalition government.
“This is a people’s rebellion against the establishment that keeps curbing the media to promote parties of their own choices,” Aziz Sanghur, a senior journalist and author, said. "This is the 21st century and the age of IT, we must not forget."
Facing fierce clampdowns on their social media accounts, as well as attempts to impede their election campaigns, the contesting candidates had to be on their toes. They managed to outmanoeuvre the censorship through a variety of means including using all of the social media platforms to their advantage.
“Our social media and IT team kept struggling against the closure of data services and our social media accounts, [by] creating VPN connections and using other means,” Yasir Baloch, a PTI candidate for the Sindh provincial assembly told Index.
Members of his constituency extended their help to Baloch.
“On the election day when data service and mobile phone service was switched off, the people in our constituency volunteered to give our team access to their home wi-fi connections. That was a huge favour for us,” he said.
Conventional canvassing methods also had to be re-assessed.
“We managed to hold our meetings [within] the compound wall instead of open places as we had to face the police crackdowns on our rallies,” he said. “We carried our campaign door to door and women played a leading role.”
But it will be hard for Pakistan to establish media freedoms.
“There have been many draconian laws that governed the media and press, but this time ‘invisible’ hands unleashed gagging censorship, which is unprecedented,” said Tauseef Ahmed Khan, a professor and author of several books on Pakistani media and a media practitioner.
Khan was referring to the constant interventions from the powerful military establishment. Many journalists working for the national television channels spoke to Index on the condition of anonymity. They confirmed the practice of daily intervention by the media wing of the military, known as Inter Services Public Relations or ISPR.
“When they [dictated to] us the news packages in the beginning, I predicted that the days were not far off and that they would dictate the whole rundown,” said a senior journalist, who works with Geo TV, the country’s top private television channel.
“My fears came true as now we get dictation from ISPR on a daily basis, with the advice that the news must be broadcast without attribution,” he said.
Empirical surveys with senior journalists at many independent news channels confirmed this, including ARY, Neo News, Abb Takk, Aaj TV, Hum TV, 92 News, KTN, Express TV, 24 News and Dawn News. These are all top-ranking television channels, watched widely across Pakistan.
“We are obliged to run that news to protect our job,” one journalist said.
The party that won the last general election and was in power from 2018 until 2022 remained a pivotal target of the censorship. Imran Khan, the former cricketer turned politician, led his PTI party. Coming into power for the first time in 2018, Khan had a strong backing from the military establishment, a channel that inherently matters more than popular votes in the country. Catalysing the military support, Khan made full use of censorship and media clampdowns to suppress independent journalists as well as political opponents. Legal cases were registered against media houses, journalists and social media commentators for raising voices against his policies and political discourse.
“Khan in fact torpedoed the financial structure of the media industry, [which] was a fatal blow to the free press,” Tauseef Ahmed Khan said.
Geo News, the most influential TV channel in the country which was critical of Imran Khan and supportive of Nawaz Sharif, was cast out of government sponsored advertisements in 2020, the biggest source of revenue to the industry. It was taken off air in different cities and parts of the country, including the cantonment areas, administered by the military.
But the tables turned when Khan was ousted in 2022 in a no-confidence vote after a fallout with the military. He was jailed for corruption, and later for leaking state secrets.
Tit-for-tat censorship ensued under the new under-the-radar sanctions. Khan’s party was declared proscribed and naming it or Khan on television channels was banned by the military-backed coalition government of the Pakistan Democratic Movement.
No let-up was seen in censorship by the care-taker government appointed in August 2023, which only had a mandate to hold general elections in Pakistan. The caretaker government under Prime Minister Anwar ul Haq Kakar took more stringent measures to black out Khan and his party from the mainstream media.
The undeclared news boycott of Khan’s party continued until the election day on 8 February 2024, while its supporters ran a robust campaign on social media. His party was denied the opportunity to contest the election under the pretext of the party’s failure to hold intra-party elections, a constitutional prerequisite for a political party to become eligible for general election participation.
Frustrating the party’s social media ‘warriors’, the authorities clamped down by switching off internet networks countrywide repeatedly over recent years, usually targeting social media or messaging services.
“Curbing internet access during elections strikes at democracy’s heart, betraying human rights,” Surfshark, a media watchdog said in a statement.
On the very day of elections on 8 February, a complete shutdown of mobile services crippled journalists in the field who were covering the elections. The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, the state-regulator, said it had decided to do so in view of the worsening law and order situation.
“The decision to suspend telecommunications and mobile internet services on election day is a blunt attack on the rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly,” Amnesty International reacted.
The failures of the mainstream media alarms media pundits, who see an ominous trend in the coming weeks.
“This is very unfortunate that the mainstream media seem to have lost its credibility against the social media in the country,” said Sohail Sangi, a veteran journalist, who has served imprisonment in dictatorial regimes for raising his voice for press freedom.
It is feared that propaganda will replace factual news.
“We know that on social media, largely unauthentic info goes viral and its impact is huge,” Tauseef Ahmed Khan said.
“This might transform the media landscape in the country if things are not fixed.”
