Fact-Checking Coronavirus Disinformation in Pakistan

This article is part of IranWire's ongoing coverage of Covid-19 disinformation in different countries, in partnership with Health Studio.

By Ramsha Jahangir for Health Studio

The past few months have been hectic for Zainab Hussain. The 25-year-old has been glued to her phone ever since the coronavirus pandemic hit Pakistan in February 2020 and now works four days a week as a fact-checker.

As part of a team comprising just three members, she runs Soch Fact Check, an avowedly non-partisan organisation dedicated to sorting fact from fiction. The platform’s stated goal is to stop the spread of misinformation and disinformation by promoting accuracy in the media and in public discourse.

“We launched in January this year,” she told me in a phone interview, “but it’s been a roller-coaster since then. The internet is inundated with false content about Covid-19. It is a tireless job.”

So far the team of three has fact-checked nearly 40 posts featuring disinformation, including false claims about vaccines and injections, home remedies, and the situation of Covid-19 patients in Pakistan.

Covid-19 disinformation is far from unique to Pakistan. The over-abundance of information on the web, some accurate and plenty of it not, has been described by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as an “infodemic”. All around the world, fact-checkers are tackling unverified claims regarding the origin of the virus, its symptoms, prevention techniques, vaccines and other news.

The spread of unreliable content, however, is exacerbated in Pakistan by the dearth of fact-checkers in the country. Research I conducted for the Lahore-based Digital Rights Foundation found that 88 percent of the journalists interviewed said they’d never undergone fact-checking training.

Equally worryingly, there are very few dedicated fact-checkers employed in Pakistani newsrooms. More than 80 percent of journalists surveyed by the DRF said that no one fact-checked content in the newsrooms they worked in.

In fact, Soch is one of just two fact-checking outlets in the country — and they do not even operate full-time. “No one recognises fact-checking as a profession here,” Hussain said. “Our efforts are also limited by funds. To work full-time, we have to invest extra time besides desk work.”

The Pakistani media’s lack of investment in verification may ultimately be to its detriment. “We have observed that there is increasing mistrust in mainstream media in Pakistan,” said Hussain. “People trust social media. This is why it is so important to educate them on digital literacy.”

Success for the right wing?

The lack of fact-checking in Pakistan has not gone unnoticed. The gap is being exploited by the country’s right wing, where various groups are invested in the dissemination of false content that builds on alarmist theories.

“At Soch, we prioritise claims regarding vulnerable minority groups that have the potential to incite violence against those groups,” says Hussain. “With Covid-19, there is a stigma attached to the patient and this makes it easier for right-wing groups to discriminate.”

Many of the right-wing conspiracies surround Bill Gates. In a 2018 speech, Gates had warned that a deadly disease could threaten the lives of millions of people. Anti-vaccine groups claim Gates is leading efforts to depopulate the world and have repackaged the speech as “evidence” that the world’s richest man planned the pandemic in order to control the global health system. A YouTube search of “Bill Gates corona” leads to dozens of videos promoting anti-vaccination conspiracy theories related to Covid-19 in Urdu.

The results of a search for "Bill Gates corona" in Urdu on YouTube

Videos based on the speech have been shared by Pakistan’s leading right-wing YouTube channel, Haqeeqat TV, and viewed by millions of people. One such video claims that Bill Gates foresaw coronavirus two years ago and has been viewed more than 216,000 times. Another video shared by the channel claims coronavirus is being brought to Pakistan by pharmaceutical companies that will profit by Rs 400 billion if they succeed in getting vaccines approved.

The video was released after an appeal by Pakistani students, who had been stranded in China’s Wuhan city since January 23, for their immediate return after a strict lockdown was enforced in the city following the outbreak of coronavirus. A “virus mafia”, the video claimed, was “emotionally blackmailing” the people of Pakistan and exploiting the fear and anxiety fuelled by Covid-19 to raise the sale of masks and testing kits, it claimed. The media, it added, was spreading propaganda and would never show the “reality”.

Ironically, these kinds of videos exert their own forms of fear-mongering by encouraging mistrust in governments and international organisations such as the WHO. They also twist scientifically-evidenced facts to suit their purposes, counting on pandemic-fuelled panic and uncertainty to make their narratives more alluring.

“Sensationalist content from YouTube is shared on WhatsApp and Facebook family groups,” Hussain says. “Such conspiracies are often based on pre-conceived notions such as Western propaganda and mistrust in media.”

The Way Forward

With organized disinformation groups now gaining ground, there is a growing need for digital literacy initiatives. Amel Ghani, who leads Sachee Khabar, a fact-checking project run by Media Matters for Democracy, said: “A lot of Covid-19 research being quoted in the media and WhatsApp groups has small sample sizes and is not reliable.  We’re investing more and more on educational posts that help the public assess what information to rely on.”

According to Ghani, encouraging people to be critical of the information they consume and react to online is the best antidote to disinformation. “Right now, most people in Pakistan don’t even know what misinformation and disinformation are. We need to break it down for them and only then can we expect them to be better consumers of information.”