Day before yesterday, Afghan Taliban formed a new government in Afghanistan after successful negotiations between them and Ashraf Ghani’s government. Late at night, the Afghan Taliban got control of the Afghan Presidential Palace.
According to the documents that were found by the new government of Afghanistan, it was revealed that a team was being sponsored directly by Ashraf Ghani and Hamadullah Mohib to malign Pakistan.The Afghan National Security Directorate was sponsoring a well-paid team of 170 people to run baseless social media campaigns against Pakistan. This network was involved in anti-Pakistan campaigns. According to the details, these campaigns were initiated by pouring in fake news. Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM) and other anti-Pakistan elements were frontline social media workers to promote the trends.
This campaign was directly supported by the puppet regime of Ashraf Ghani. Afghan Vice President Amrullah Saleh and Defence Minister General Bismillah provided patronage to the social media campaign. Different Indian media organisations also participated in this misinformation campaign and created fake Wikipedia pages to promote fake news in order to trend different anti-pakistan hashtags like #SanctionPakistan on social media. Last week, the Minister for Information and Broadcasting, Fawad Chaudhry, in a press conference exposed fake trends against Pakistan. PTM led 150 trends against Pakistan with 3.7 million fake tweets. The IP addresses of the fake users were from India and Afghanistan. Last year, EU Disinfo lab also mentioned that PTM and others are being popped up by fake Indian news outlets.