RAWALPINDI – Director General Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR) MajGeneral Asif Ghafoor hinted that Pakistan is under a war on social mediafront.
He said that the security establishment is keeping tabs on social mediaactivities and monitoring ‘anti-state’ accounts.
Addressing a press briefing on Monday, DG ISPR said, “We have thecapability to monitor it [Social media]”.
During the briefing, an image of a social media account was also sharedwith the attendees which Ghafoor claimed tweets against the armed forcesand the state. “Look who retweet this account, and we know these peopleare,” said Ghafoor while referring to blanked out spaces on the image. “Weunderstand the whole network.”
DG ISPR claimed that during the period of January to May 2018 the number ofanti-stats troll accounts operate domestically increased from 2,000 to3,000 while during the same period, number of anti-state accounts overseasare over 10,000. “It shows how social media is being used to create‘ripples’ in the county,” he said.
As long as these accounts target us personally, we practice restraint. Butwhen it comes to the state, we share this information with the relevantauthorities and work on it. These people, whose profiles have been blankedout, retweets the anti-state tweets and encourages them. If we will not actresponsibly while using social media, then the anti-state
We have to stay united and have to defeat them. This social media is not athreat as of now. But countries that have control this menace; they havedone it through awareness.
Further, Ghafoor claimed that images that usually pop up on social mediaare not true.