Federal Minister for Information and Broadcasting Fawad Chaudhry on Sunday expressed the government’s desire to set up an authority to regulate mainstream as well as social media in the country.
Despite resistance from the opposition parties and representatives of media organisations, the minister announced setting up Pakistan Media Development Authority (PMDA).
“We need to think over fake news, sectarian news and hate material. We are setting up Pakistan Media Development Authority (PMDA). Digital media is our future,” said Fawad while talking to the representatives of digital media platforms.
“The PMDA will bring an end to the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA), Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), the Press Council of Pakistan (PCP), the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC), the Central Board of Film Censors (CBFC), the Press Registrar Office and the Implementation Tribunal for Newspaper Employees (ITNE),” he added.
He said it is in the public interest that digital media is regulated to control “abusive, harmful and hateful content”.
Today, we have been facing a challenge to differentiate between genuine and fake news. Former US president Barack Obama had stated in 2013 that the biggest challenge for the governments was to handle the flow of disinformation, Fawad added.
The minister said a recent report of the ministry’s digital media wing had revealed that a hybrid war has been launched against Pakistan.
“The fifth-generation war and hybrid war are not a philosophy, rather they are in front of us as a reality,” said Fawad.
He recalled that when the government had launched a crackdown on the banned Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) in Karachi, thousands of tweets were uploaded in just three hours stating that a civil war had started. India was behind all these tweets, he continued.
He said that India was supporting anti-state narrative in Pakistan, adding that there were many tweets from India about one sect.
“The anti-Pakistan elements in India have the biggest hand behind the sectarian strife in Pakistan,” he asserted.
Fawad stated that soon after becoming the information minister, he had predicted that digital media would replace formal media for which he had to face criticism.
In 2018, he said, he wrote a letter to the Ministry of Finance, stating that the way advertising was moving forward, it would be around Rs12 billion in digital media over the next five years. In 2018, it was Rs4 billion and, in just three years, it had reached Rs25 billion, he said.
The minister revealed that Google and Facebook were generating a revenue of about Rs7 billion from Pakistan in advertisements. In the next two to three years, he said, formal media advertising would lag behind, while digital advertising would move forward.
“We need to keep an eye on digital advertising and it is very important to regulate it,” he said.
Fawad said the US was the world’s only superpower because it had a peaceful neighbourhood. On the other hand, he said, Pakistan had India on one side and Afghanistan on the other. Because of this situation, the region was facing some problems for which they would have to take decisions while keeping in mind the ground realities.
Meanwhile, Fawad Chaudhry said the total number of newspapers approved by the ABC in Pakistan was 1,672 of which 800 were dummies. At present 183 million mobile SIMs had been issued and safely only 100 million to 120 million mobile phone users were in the country.
The minister said that 98 million mobile users were on 3G and 4G services with a broadband depth of 100m. He said WhatsApp users in the country were 65 million, YouTube users over 56 million, Facebook users 37 million, Tiktok users 20 million and Twitter users over five million.
