EDITORIAL: Lahore police arrested 31-year-old Farhan Asif on Wednesday, later handing him to cyber wing of the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) for his alleged role in spreading misinformation about the July 29 stabbing attack that left three girls dead and 10 other people injured in Southport that led to week-long riots all across the UK.
He is accused of being the first to falsely report on his social media website ‘Channel3 Now’ — claiming to be managed by people in Pakistan and the US — that the attacker was a recently arrived asylum seeker named Ali Al-Shakati. The misleading information quickly spread online and set off attacks by angry far-right agitators on mosques and asylum centres as well as Asian and Black Britons. The real suspect was later identified as a British-born Christian man whose parents came from Rwanda.
Since the case pertains to what happed in a Western country the investigating agencies, unlike the treatment they mete out to social media critics of the rulers, have been careful not to commit any transgression. A case has been registered against the suspect under the Prevention of Electronic Crime Act, 2016.
The Lahore DIG Police (Operations) told a foreign newspaper that Asif was detained after the police received a video from British channel ITV regarding his alleged role in spreading the misinformation on his website, adding that “he was not arrested, just being interviewed.”
He was handed to the FIA as the police did not have the capacity “to deal with this type of cybercrime”. And that during the interview the suspect had said he had ‘reposted’ content found on a social media source to generate traffic on his website because the number of advertisements he receives depends on the volume of traffic the website attracts.
For further questioning, the FIA sought and was granted permission by a judicial magistrate for Asif’s physical remand for a day and was to appear again before the court the next day. That is the right way to deal with suspected disseminators of fake news.
It is worth noting that initially the incendiary social media post was attributed to Tim Abitt, leader of the far-right Islamophobic English Defence League. But no one in that country called for putting restrictions on social media platforms.
Instead, the troublemakers were identified and made to face the law. Unfortunately, in this country the government is busy erecting a ‘fire wall’ on social media platforms to stifle criticism of its policies and actions on the pretext of curbing ‘cyber terrorism’.
It may now want to use the present case to try and openly rationalise suppression of dissent by conflating genuine criticism with false news which is a common phenomenon in Western countries, too. Intentional or unintentional purveyors of misinformation can be easily tracked down, as was Farhan Asif, by their IP addresses. They should be held to account under the existing relevant laws. There is no justification whatsoever to clamp down on freedom of expression that our Constitution guarantees, on one pretext or another.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2024
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