Disruption of Media and the Social Media and Pakistan’s Electoral Politics: A Curious Case of the Democracy-Authoritarianism-Oligarchy Triad

Even democracy, while effecting epistemic and social injustice, can easily converge with authoritarianism metamorphosing into oligarchy. This triadic convergence defines the sociopolitical scenario of Pakistan at present. The ruling elite authoritatively revamps the ostensibly democratic set up, worsening the situation of epistemic and social injustice whereby the oligarchs solely recognize and protect each other’s interests and possessions at the expense of public interest. All political ideologies – from the left to the right – have made a consortium on a single point agenda – every means has to be tried to keep a genuinely established political leader, Imran Khan, away from holding the office of the prime minister of Pakistan. The authoritarian oligarchs have been doing things transcendent of the morals and manners of democracy, disrupting negatively the very democracy-heuristics comprising the institutions like parliament, judiciary, bureaucracy, and media etcetera. Owing to a series of violent and unscrupulous stratagems for dealing with their opponent democrats, the ruling elites have made it extremely unlikely to practice the human rights discourse of freedom in terms of expression, criticism and political movement etcetera. Now like the ruling oligarchs the ruled majority of Pakistanis have also disrupted, positively though, the ideological identities – the left and the right. Before February 08, 2024, they had been hopeful that the general elections would genuinely be held, re-enlightening the sociopolitical horizon of the country. But unfortunately the general elections had been rigged enormously and the mandate of Pakistani voters had been stolen in order to reestablish the rule of the same oligarchs who had already ruined the democratic state structure vehemently. At this moment, the masses both from the left and the right horizons of society have now started protesting in the streets as well as on the social media for the recovery of their stolen democratic mandate with the hope that they will finally establish the majority rule in accord with the genuine polling results of the February 8-general elections. In this horrible phase of epistemic injustice in terms of ban on print and electronic media, the robust democrats are finding new scientific ways of communication like social media and AI in order to strengthen their political movement. In order to suppress such freedom expressions of millions of Pakistanis through social media and AI, the regime has recently installed a national internet FireWall. This is a geo-fencing internet firewall capable of tracking, blocking, and significantly limiting the visibility of social media content in real time. In addition, it has put a countrywide ban on using twitter (X) which is the most effective means of freedom of expression on social media. But the fact of the matter is that after having made all these efforts, the oligarchy only limitedly succeeds in suppressing the public expression of freedom on social media, as the public switches over to other means of expression in case it is blocked on a given front of the infinite world of social media.