The government’s Digital Media Wing (DMW) recently released a report titled, ‘Anti-State Trends: Deep Analytics Report’. The Current analysed the report, which was discussed on Geo News programme ‘Aaj Shahzeb Khanzada Kay Sath’ on Thursday night. The Current found glaring errors in the report.
Mentioning The Current’s research, Shahzeb Khanzada stated the facts mentioned in our report. “From The Current’s analysis, the 134-page report has 85 pages that have screenshots of tweets, which means that 63.4 per cent of the report is based on screenshots of people who are using a certain hashtag that the government has identified as being anti-state. The number of tweets that are in these 85 pages amounts to 666 tweets out of which 142 tweets are from three accounts, which means that 21.3 per cent of the tweets used in this study came from three people.”
“After further analysis of the three accounts, The Current discovered that all three accounts had a combined following of less than 11,000,” mentioned Shahzeb.
The report was released Wednesday evening around 5:30PM and a few hours later a disclaimer was added to the report. According to journalist Fereeha Idrees, the disclaimer was added after she raised the issue with the DMW for being highlighted in the report as a ‘replies with the most followers’ account.
Shahzeb Khanzada also mentioned that The Current reached out to TweepsMap, which was the primary analysis app used by the government for this report. The maps and information all have the Tweepsmap link on the maps and all charts in the report. We asked the CEO of TweepsMap Samir Al-Battran if they considered the analysis of the report to be authentic since it used their app service. Samir told us, “The government of Pakistan is not authorised to use our service. We will investigate how they got access to our analysis and get back to you on this.”
Federal Minister for Information and Broadcasting Fawad Chaudhry refuted these claims on Shahzeb Khanzada’s programme.
“Were the Twitter trends data compiled without research? Was the press conference held without reading the final draft? Was the patriotism of our own citizens deliberately questioned? How did you determine which tweet is anti and pro-state?,” asked Shahzeb.
“The data could have been complied on a single page as well. We analysed the data for the past two years, around 150 trends were made, and we checked how India and Afghanistan glorified those trends. Around 37 lac tweets were done on the very trends. We spent around 1,000 hours going through those tweets,” said Fawad Chaudhry.
Shahzeb reiterated the fact that the report should have included how India and Afghanistan were involved in generating, promoting, and glorifying the very trends and sentiment analysis of the tweets should have been checked.
” I think you did not read the mechanism and neither did you try to understand the work done in the report,” replied the minister.
“The positive and negative sentiment does not matter, what matters is that people participated in the trend. India did all this because it wanted to portray to the international spheres that there is chaos within Pakistan,” added Fawad.
Former Interior Minister Rehman Malik also thanked Shahzeb for highlighting how his anti-India tweet was also part of the DMW report. “I hope someone from the Govt will apologise to me tomorrow.”
