Social media is changing the world in many ways. On one side it’s making people closer globally on many fronts and enlightening them through constructive communication. For example, social media was used very effectively during protests in Hong Kong in 2019. Hashtag activism was practised with the help of social media platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter very successfully for gathering the masses. Similarly, Twitter was used very effectively for two hashtag campaigns of “Black lives matter” and “Me too” throughout the world, which helped creating awareness about the two important issues.
On the other side, negative use of social media is also affecting the masses. It’s being used for promoting hate speech through hashtag activism. The use of social media as a tool of hate speech, influencing minds through targeted propaganda regarding some specific ideology by the extremist organisations like ISIS can be observed worldwide. ISIS was very proactive in recruiting people by using social media apps like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Similarly social media platforms were also used very effectively by three radical groups, “Abu Sayyaf” from Philippines, “Jamat e Islami” from Bangladesh and “Uyghurs” in China for propagating their agenda.
In Pakistan social media platforms were used for propagating their agenda by Tehreek e Talban Pakistan, (TTP), through their You Tube Channel “Umer Media”With that , here we also observe that , social media is being used for promoting hate speech regarding blasphemy by some extremist outfits and their members. This can be evident from the case of Junaid Hafeez, a professor of BZU University Multan, who was accused for blasphemy in 2013 just on the basis of his Facebook post, which was edited and was sent to all social media networks, which resulted in his arrest and even his lawyer, Rashid Rehman was also murdered for defending his case.
Likewise, in the case of Mashal khan, fake account on his name was made and blasphemous content was being circulated on it, after his death just to justify his brutal lynching. Same was happened to the five bloggers who were accused of blasphemous charges just because of a fake social media campaign against them. Although all the charges against them were found false, but still they were forced to leave the country. This negative use of social media effects the youth and provoke them to take a serious violent step in individual capacity or in mob.
For individual acts we have examples of student murdering his teacher in Bahawalpur in 2019 and a young man, killing accused Ahamdi Man in Peshawar Court in 2020. For mob lynching incidents, we have cases of Mashal khan in 2017, burning of a Christian Husband, Wife in 2014 and now Lynching and burning of Sri Lankan, manager in Sialkot. And after committing such heinous acts, they are glorified on social media also, which again makes youth more prone to these types of violent acts.
So, the effect of social media, hashtag activism in promoting religious extremism, which results in violence among masses is evident here in Pakistan. It can be reduced by identifying and monitoring those social media accounts of religious outfits, involving in it. With that to counter this negative aspect of hashtag activism, the state can also use social media platforms constructively, which will eventually result in reducing hatred among the masses.
