ISLAMABAD: Mainstream politicians of Pakistan and their family members are silently facing severe character assassination at the hands of the ‘social media warriors’ as there is no specific law to deal with these ‘evil’ elements who work with impunity without getting people know about their true location and identity.
Given the upcoming general elections, hundreds of posts daily appearing on the Facebook are targeting various political leaders with animated or distorted photographs, false information and misleading facts including President Asif Ali Zardari, PTI Chief Imran Khan, PML-N leader Nawaz Sharif and MQM chief Altaf Hussain.
Showing concerns over the growing situation, the experts opined that with trillions of bytes of information available from private thoughts to public data how they could define what constituted privacy rights and libel and how they could be able to get to know the true identity of Facebook or twitter users.
“It is quite difficult to ascertain the true identity of fake account users who are actively involved in spreading defamatory material on the social networking sites against the political leaders and their family members,” they said.
Statistics provided by social bankers revealed that Facebook users had crossed 8 million mark while twitter users were now also more than 3 million in Pakistan, and many prominent persons were often seen informing people that some people were using fake Facebook or twitter accounts carrying their names and they had nothing to do with those accounts.
It is pertinent to mention here that a prominent anchor person in his talk show recently admitted that despite trying hard he could not be able to ascertain the true identity of those people who had levelled some serious but baseless allegations against him using fake Facebook accounts.
One can get to know the name and profession of a blogger but those who use fake Facebook or twitter accounts to launch defamatory campaign against persons, groups or political parties cannot be identified and they can continue their ‘work’ without any fear or danger of facing any legal action. Internews
