We are living in exponential times; when the number of text messages sent and received every day exceeds the total population of the planet, 2.7 billion searches are performed on Google every month, 47 million laptops, 1.5 billion smartphones sold and 40 exabytes (4.0×1019) of unique information is being put on the internet every year. Control of information has been shifted from governments to people, media has become a human, everybody is an artist, sharing has become a culture of information dissemination, 1 out of 8 couples married in the Europe meet online for the first time and 1.18 billion daily active users (DAUs) are present on social media platforms like Facebook with a 17% increase per annum.
No newspaper or the satellite or local TV channel has so much audience as the social media. Unlike the newspapers and television channels, it has an added capacity which no one else can claim; seamless and similar transmission to every country and reader at the same time. In the case of international newspapers, their distribution in other countries is not even 5% of their total distribution in the home country and a highly famous TV channel of one country may not be present on the cable of a citizen of another country altogether. This makes social media the most powerful, influential, commanding, prevailing, dominant, mighty, formidable and weighty medium of information dissemination today and that too beyond the clutches of the governments.
While its impact on the business generation, revenue collection and product sales can be discussed in a separate article, today, the compelling issue is its positive and negative impact in the religious hemisphere. Impious exclamation or action against the God, Prophet (PBUH) or anything considered sacred in Islam is called Blasphemy. The same is true for other religions but more severe punishments are present in Islam for those who commit that.
Although the holy book Quran reprimands blasphemy but the specific punishment for this has been given in different hadiths (sayings of the prophet). The punishments in the fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) are different for Muslims, non-Muslims, men or women. These include fine, imprisonment, flogging, amputation, hanging or beheading. “Fatwa”, a call for punishment by a qualified Muslim cleric is an added source as well.
But all these punishments announced by the Muslim governments around the globe have placed no threat to the social media. The western concept of “Freedom of Expression” is opposite to the Muslim concept of Blasphemy. The west allows anything in the bracket of freedom, including the blasphemy although their public at large do not endorse; the east and especially the Muslim countries think otherwise. This is giving rise to a growing tension between the relations of the Western and the Muslim Worlds. While Muslim countries have specific laws against the blasphemy, many of them with capital punishment, they argue that such laws against the blasphemy (Western free speech) help to maintain societal and inter-religious harmony. However, the opponents are of the view that laws against blasphemy are actually used to suppress the minorities in the Muslim countries.
Both arguments have material. In the Muslim countries and particularly Pakistan, the Blasphemy Laws (295, A-B-C 298, A-B-C) have been used to kill and suppress the minorities for the multiple times, totally against its true spirit on multiple times. The most horrible of such misuse was in 2014 when Shama Bibi and Sajjad Masih, a pregnant Christian Pakistani woman was killed alongside her husband for alleged blasphemy which was later proved to be a case of indentured servitude where their boss planned this barbaric act to give them a punishment for fleeing debts.
But there is another side of the story, the West’s love for the blasphemers on the name of Freedom of Expression. Not only the blasphemous publications such as “Satanic Verses”, cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, and online video called “Innocence of Muslims” have been given royal treatment and protection by the West but also their authors have been presented as the torch bearers of the freedom of expression. This, therefore, has sowed the seeds of hate among the East and West, polarized the issue and created a hateful spur among the religions of the world.
In Pakistan, the Islamic Republic, blasphemy has created a governance challenge on social media. Facebook pages like Bhensa, Roshni, Mochi and Groups like Pakistani Freethinkers have been using the social media space to humiliate, gag and abuse the most sacred religious icons in the Islam, the world’s second largest religion. Although running since long, once noted, the complaints to the Country’s Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) reached to a level that the government had left with no option but to respond. The first action against this came when bloggers Salman Haider, Waqas Goraya, Aasim Saeed, Ahmed Raza Naseer and Samar Abbas were picked up in a mysterious way. After their arrest, the control of few blasphemous pages came to someone else who not only deleted the blasphemous content but also posted Quranic verses instead.
Earlier in 2010, the Facebook itself hosted a competition of blasphemous drawings and had hurt billions of Muslims through this shameful action. Then, the internet penetration in Pakistan was negligible and 3G/4G services were not present. Facebook users from Pakistan were a little and the online business was insignificant. But here in 2017, the situation is totally different. Pakistan today has 124 million mobile phone subscribers. Out of them 37 million use internet, 20 million access it through 3G/4G and 30 million are active on the Facebook. It is the most popular medium to market products, generate revenue and post advertisements in Pakistan for the internet users. Facebook, therefore, is also collecting healthy revenue from the country through these business activities.
Due to this, when the civil society filed a petition in the high court of the country’s capital seeking an order to ban Facebook for not blocking the blasphemous content, The Islamabad High Court (IHC) Justice Shaukat Siddiqui clearly directed the authorities to suspend Facebook in the country if it does not block blasphemous material. The Facebook immediately responded to the Pakistani government call this time. It not only nominated a focal person to negotiate with the Pakistani authorities but also gave a public statement showing its commitment to resolve the issue.
Earlier this month the Pakistani Ministry of Interior stated in the court that the Facebook has blocked 85pc of such material and the process of the removal of remaining 15pc is in progress. While the process of removal of blasphemous content is continued, it has posed serious challenges for our Ministry of Information and Technology. If it fails to block the blasphemous material, the public outrage can not only dismantle the political stability but also defame the present government considerably. However, on the other hand, the government’s control of the social media is very limited and is totally dependent on the Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Instagram and other site’s management. The Pakistani traffic on these sites is bottomless and until January this year, there were 44 million social media accounts by Pakistanis on these sites. Statistics show that apart from 30 million Facebook users, there are 7.1 million LINE, 3.9 million Instagram, 3.1 million twitter and 0.4 million Snapchat active users in Pakistan.
When Curtis Hougland, CEO of Attentionusa.com, a global social marketing agency said, “Today’s social media is providing myriad assistance in connecting the globe together but that comes at the expense of the state and world’s stability”, he was absolutely right. Social media has displayed its ability to spread violence, hate, terror, sectarianism and lawlessness. It has pulled apart the sectarian seams in Iraq, tribal divisions in Afghanistan, compromised the national interests of Ukraine, Libya, Syria and has developed a new geography of Gaza. A map of civil protest issued by the Foreign Policy Magazine confirms that the above-stated unrests were instigated or intensified through the social media. The largest recruitment campaign by the ISIS was successfully launched on the social media as well and the beheading videos by the same terror organization reached the world through the same medium. It is the fact that the owners of these social media sites have very limited capacity and ability to check, approve or disapprove the content being posted on their sites as well.
The editorial check which is well in placed in the regular media (newspapers, tv channels, magazines) is nowhere present on the social media at all. This makes it an open source of reaching more than 2 billion people of the world in a few seconds that are present on the internet and that even without an editorial check. For this many countries have blocked access to social media to keep their home at peace. These include Iran, China and North Korea. Unrest in Bangladesh forced its government to block Facebook many times during the period of 2009-2017, Egypt tried the same as well. And Germany forced the Facebook during the refugee crisis to erase the hate material against the refugees that were reaching its borders to avoid conflict inside the country and to save the reaching helpless from any hate attack.
The list is no shorter as Malaysia, Mauritius, Morocco, Syria, Tajikistan and Vietnam also found that they are helpless against the “Social Media Attack”. The United Kingdom itself, in 2011 before the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton forced the Facebook to remove a number of pages that were raising an opposite voice. The government also arrested a number of known activists who tried to organize demonstrations in a continuation of the 2010 UK student protests.
Pakistan must not fall victim to the social media unrest. The country is already caught in sectarian, tribal, provincial, lingual, terror and political unrest. Means to fuel it will be fatal. It is the high time that strategists must come forward to resist the new media. Because I believe that over the next century, social media will break many great nations into smaller ones. The Balkanization will come, can we govern?
