19 Dec 24 | News and features, Pakistan
In the last week of November, Pakistan went into what was essentially an internet blackout. Social media apps like WhatsApp were inaccessible after the authorities blocked internet and mobile phone services. This was ahead of a planned march to Islamabad by supporters of former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party (PTI), in protest of Khan’s imprisonment.
The government cited security concerns and initially said it would be a partial shutdown, but internet delays and shutdowns were reported across the country. Two weeks after the protest, users were still reporting connection delays that are impacting both their communications and their livelihoods. In addition to this most recent internet shutdown, Pakistani authorities have also restricted connection through a content specific “firewall”.
This isn’t the only form of censorship seen in Pakistan amid the crackdown on PTI’s long march, both before and after the event. Prominent journalist Matiullah Jan was picked up by a group of unidentified individuals from Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS) hospital in Islamabad on 28 November and released on 30 November on bail under a narcotics and terror case that international human rights organisations are calling “bogus” and “baseless”.
Soon after his abduction, his son put out a statement calling out authorities for arresting his father over his reporting. Jan was also abducted in 2020, and is one of many journalists in Pakistan who continue to be punished for their work.
Farieha Aziz, a Karachi-based journalist and director of digital rights organisation Bolo Bhi, told Index that Pakistan’s increase in crackdowns and censorship in recent years impacts people in one of two ways.
“Some will [fight it] even more, and some will become more circumspect,” she said. Experts believe that what happened around the protest seems to be the final piece in long drawn-out efforts to slowly curb internet access and freedom of expression in the country.
With internet access being shut down regularly whenever there’s a major event — including protests and elections — these attempts are becoming increasingly successful.
“These restrictions will only increase. They aren’t something that will go away with time,” said digital rights researcher Seerat Khan, adding that authoritarianism is increasing across the globe and that those influences are being seen in Pakistan too.
Aziz added that Pakistan’s direction makes it comparable with countries which are known for their questionable human rights records. She said that parallels can be made with Myanmar and China, for instance, and restricting the use of virtual private networks (VPNs) can be compared to Russia.
What’s particularly concerning activists and everyday citizens is that this censorship is becoming part of everyday life. Aside from the complete internet shutdowns — which already cause significant damage — internet delays and bans on certain content are also common and a lot harder to spot.
Digital rights activist and researcher Anam Baloch explained that by not blocking entire platforms all the time, Pakistan’s internet bans aren’t always immediately detectable.
“Recently, WhatsApp and Instagram issues were reported but when we tested [them] on OONI [Open Observatory of Network Interference] they were fine because they were not blocking entire platforms,” Baloch told Index.
It’s not just freedom of expression that’s impacted. Pakistan’s economy heavily relies on its growing digital sector, and the country produces 20,000 IT graduates every year — many of whom work as freelancers or in small startups that rely on the internet. IT industry trade association, the Pakistan Software Houses Association (P@SHA), released a statement predicting that the disruptions could result in a loss of $300 million for the country’s IT sector.
“A lot of reporting has been done on how it affects freelancers and small businesses, which is true because they don’t have backups. But what the media is [leaving] out is that the internet forms the basis of most businesses, even in Pakistan, where for some reason people think it doesn’t matter. Everything works on some kind of digital connectivity,” freelance cybercrime and tech journalist Sindhu Abbasi said.
All of these impacts are linked together, Khan added, and freedom of expression directly links to other freedoms like access to information and freedom of association and assembly.
“All these freedoms are under attack,” she said. And there’s no longer much room to challenge the restrictions.”
“You’re out of options of what to do. [Before] you could file a public interest litigation or speak to someone in parliament,” Aziz said, adding: “Not that [anything] happened because of that, but at least there was this dialogue — and now there’s no dialogue.”
Censorship has been slowly increasing, while Pakistanis have looked on in horror as they’ve felt unable to do anything to prevent it. First came the internet and mobile services shutdowns during election days and important events. Then in February of this year, X was banned, as the Interior Ministry claimed the platform was a “threat to peace and national security.”
Abbasi said that under the former PTI government, “the internet would be blocked in areas we call ‘peripheries’, such as Balochistan and Gilgit-Baltistan”. More recently, reports of internet bans in Kurram after problems with sectarian violence in November and in Pakistan-administered Kashmir during protests in May, show just how much the government relies on these bans as a form of control.
For now, rights advocates are losing hope of finding a way out, and many have told Index that things may only get worse from here.
23 Aug 24 | News and features
Why do we tolerate X? Elon Musk’s poisoned well is fast filling up with far-right propaganda, disinformation, hate speech and now, it would seem, adverts for machine guns and grenade launchers from Iran-backed terrorists in Yemen. This is the reality of the free speech utopia the world’s richest man promised us when he took over Twitter. And yet we continue to populate it with content. I do, Index does and many of you reading this will continue to do so. When Dr Johnson said in 1776 that “no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money” he could not have imagined a world where 335 million blockheads provide free copy for a billionaire.
It’s not just X. The social media business model depends on us all selling our labour for nothing to feed the exponential growth of the platforms.
As Musk has grown closer to Donald Trump, he has begun to openly use X to publish his own personal propaganda for his favoured candidate. His “civil war is inevitable” intervention in Britain’s summer riots demonstrates that he is actively prepared to foment division and racial tension in a country he knows little about. As the US election approaches, Musk seems intent on turning X into an ideological sewer.
So why do we stay? We stay because the rewards are immediate and addictive. We are paid, not in cash, but in dopamine hits and the validation of our followers. And it’s not all negative. Twitter was once a fantastically useful resource for journalists, providing connections, expert knowledge and hard news from an unprecedented international network. When I broadcast to my relatively modest 15,000 followers, the response is more direct and personal that in any other medium I have worked in, including mass circulation newspapers. For a small organisation like Index, X is a vital way of communicating our work with dissidents to our 80,000 followers around the world.
In recent weeks, there has been a noticeable movement away from Musk’s platform. In the UK, journalists have led the X-odus to Threads and Bluesky. In the case of Threads, owned by Meta, it’s not quite clear why it is better to write content for Mark Zuckerberg rather than Musk, although some are remarking that the tone is less openly hostile. Bluesky is positively benign in comparison, but with just six million users it has none of the reach of its nastier competitor.
Personally, I have ended up tripling my workload as I now post not just to X, but to my loyal and impeccably behaved band of 395 followers on Threads and 81 followers on Bluesky.
It would be odd for a free expression organisation to advocate for the boycott of a social media platform, but we have regular discussions internally about the ethics of remaining on X. We will, of course, keep you informed.
There are two stories we have been tracking this week in Thailand and India that would benefit from wider international circulation. The first is the dissolution of the Move Forward party in Thailand, which won the most votes in last year’s elections. Party leader Pita Limjaroenrat promised to end the practice of military intervention in Thai politics, break up monopolies and reform the country’s lese majeste laws, which restrict criticism of the royal family. Limjaroenrat told the Guardian this week: “They’re coming after us. They’re exterminating us.”
Meanwhile, this month marks the fifth anniversary of the Indian government’s decision to strip the state of Jammu and Kashmir of its autonomy. Since then we’ve reported on the many ways in which people’s free expression has been attacked in the region, from newspapers being closed and journalists arrested to mosques being closed. Last year, India’s supreme court backed Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s position on the contested region, which has been ruled in part by Pakistan and India since partition in 1947. Local elections will take place next month and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi pledged last week that he and his opposition alliance, known as the INDIA bloc, will commit themselves to restoring statehood.
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.”
14 Feb 24 | Asia and Pacific, China, News and features
It was in 2015, during my internship at one of China’s most prominent digital media publications, that I had my first close encounter with censorship. Every so often the editor-in-chief would repost a message to our online chat group coming from someone whose username was “The Person is Present” (“人在呢”). They were from the Cyberspace Administration, which is the national internet regulator and censor of China. The message was always an instruction such as “Look up and delete all related reportage on the topic of A, report by 6PM.” The username, together with the requests they made, created an Orwellian atmosphere that even at my level as just an intern was chilling. All I could think was: “Big Brother is watching you.”
That same year, “the Feminist Five”, a group of feminist activists, were arrested for planning to protest against sexual harassment on public transport just before International Women’s Day. Today even more feminists have been targeted, including Index 2022 award winner Sophia Huang Xueqin, who has been in jail for years now for her journalism and activism. Many of those who protested and were later arrested during the White Paper Revolution were also connected to the feminist movement. But not all discussions around women’s rights were or are silenced.
“To be honest, in today’s China, it’s difficult to discuss other topics in detail, but the topic of feminism can be discussed to some extent,” the journalist Qing Wang said in one episode of her podcast The Weirdo. Books about feminism by authors such as the Japanese feminist Chizuko Ueno have become bestsellers in China, even though the publishing sector censors other subjects. Feminist conversations with Chinese characteristics, which oppose the display of female sexuality and eroticism, as exemplified in the discussions around K-pop star Lisa’s Crazy Horse cabaret performance, are allowed to flourish rather than being censored because they essentially align with the ruling patriarchal and traditional Confucius values.
The most recent incident that sparked a widespread debate on feminism in the Mandarin-speaking world was a unique eulogy article written by Dr Lang Chen, the wife of assistant professor Xiaohong Xu at the University of Michigan, in which she delineated the gender dynamic in an intellectual household. The single article went viral online and reached more than 100,000 readers this January.
General feminist topics such as period poverty and gender-based healthcare inequalities are also essentially allowed. The latter discussion has even led to positive change. For example, in September 2022, after a woman’s complaint about the unavailability of sanitary towels on bullet trains became a trending topic on Weibo, the bullet trains started selling period products.
As shown in the Baidu Index, searching for the word “nvquan” (feminism) surged to a historical high at the time of the 2022 Tangshan restaurant attack, in which four women were savagely beaten by a group of men after rejecting their unwanted advances. However, the censorship machine soon turned the narrative from gender-based violence and femicide towards gang violence. Any efforts to approach the incident from a feminist angle on social media such as Weibo and WeChat was subject to the accusation of “inciting conflict between genders” and therefore scrubbed by the censors. For example, an article from the account Philosophia哲学社, which discussed the incident under the title “The Tangshan Barbecue Restaurant Incident Is Exactly An Issue of Gender”, was promptly removed from the WeChat platform. All the while other discussions asserting the idea that it was not a gender issue but rather a matter of human safety were allowed to spread.
Another illustration of where it starts to move into murkier waters is the well-known case of Zhou Xiaoxuan (better known as Xianzi) accusing Zhu Jun, a host from the state broadcaster CCTV, of sexual harassment. This case did spark widespread feminist discussions and helped launch the #MeToo movement in China. But the #MeToo term itself was promptly banned on social media (which led to a series of other terms to try and bypass the censors), Xianzi was suspended from Weibo and the court case ruled against her, symbolising a setback for China’s feminist movement.
The Chinese-US novelist Geling Yan was also silenced on Chinese social media because she voiced her anger in 2022 about the Xuzhou chained woman incident, where a woman was trafficked before being chained to a wall for years, continuously raped and gave birth to eight children. Yan called Xi Jinping “a human trafficker” in one interview. Directing her anger to the top was not appreciated. Her essays were removed from social media, she was blocked and her name was even removed from a Zhang Yimou film based on one of her novels.
So how can we make sense of the fact that some discussion of feminism is allowed while some discussion is not? Essentially feminist debate faces censorship once it starts to attract public attention, challenge the ruling power and has the potential to move to offline collective action. As one activist and member of the civic group BCome, who acted in the feminist theatre play Our Vaginas, OurSelves, has said:
“The censorship machine is most concerned with the potential of offline gathering and organised collective action. As made evident in ‘the Xuzhou chained woman incident’, Wuyi was just an ordinary netizen who had no previous activist records, and she got arrested only because she took the action of going to the actual place and investigating the incident herself.”
Due to the action-oriented nature of her work, the actor-turned-activist suffered from constant harassment from state security agents, and her phone which was registered in China, was traced and tapped.
This also helps explain the swift action around Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai, who accused a top Chinese official of sexual harassment. Shuai has largely disappeared from the public space since she spoke out. While what she did didn’t necessarily fit into the box of collective action, like the Feminist Five’s actions, Peng still went after a top official. As this Index article highlights, China has space for people to accuse low-level officials but not those at the top and Peng learnt the hard way.
Another issue that feminists now face is China’s low birthrate, which fell for the seventh year in a row in 2023. Fear is that censorship of feminism will increase as an growing number of Chinese feminists now hold negative views on marriage and childbearing. This is especially true for those identified as “radical feminists”, who are strongly against heteronormative marriage and childbearing. Many believe this was the reason behind the overnight crackdown on eight radical feminist groups in 2021 on Douban, with the officially stated reason being that they “consisted of extremism and radical political ideology”.
One episode of the critically acclaimed feminist podcast Seahorse planet, which discussed resisting the tradition of unconditionally obeying one’s parents, was similarly censored as filial piety is seen as the bedrock of the Chinese patriarchal order – which demands an increasing birthrate. On the flipside you have labels like “leftover women”, a negative term that gained traction from 2006 to essentially try and shame women into getting married, which continues to be used on one form or another. Ultimately it’s expedient for the government to pressure Chinese women into having children and they’ll ramp up rhetoric that helps that, while curtailing conversations advocating the opposite.
So is the topic of feminism free to discuss in China? Yes, so long as it’s not oriented towards collective-action, it leaves the ruling power of the party-state untouched and doesn’t threaten the birthrate, which doesn’t really leave much to discuss at all, except perhaps sanitary pads and lipstick.
