PTI’s official account-led ‘imported hukumat’ hashtag has been trending on the national and global trends panel for days, with an unprecedented volume of 17 million tweets, including retweets.
While Khan’s supporters dominated the trends panel, anti-establishment trends also benefited from the high traffic on the platform.
Dr Khalid, who was reportedly accused of running the smear campaign, in his statement pointed to a “certain lobby” for the raid at his home. “This tragedy happened because for the past few years I was wrongly framed by the then opposition and a certain lobby for running malicious social media campaigns against political opponents, women journalists, and everything under the sun,” he said.
While he did not directly address the smear trends on Twitter in his statement, he urged the “PTI family” to protest the “draconian imported set-up” through peaceful means.
“This includes using logic, data, and evidence in a respectful way to counter the government abuse of power and propaganda,” he wrote.