For the first time in the history of Pakistan it so happened that the masks of nobility were lifted from the faces of devils.. Whom we had been considering our saviours throughout the annals of time proved to be the real culprit behind the chaos and deteriorating condition of the country.
The revelation of the hidden truth was possible only because of the advent of social media in our lives.
While the conventional media has always been under the control of mightier forces in the state, social media emerged as a tool to reflect the real voices of the people.
Media houses, with their personal motives and incentives, are prone to represent the information in a light that is in best interest of the people in power. On the other hand, the arrival of social media gave each individual an opportunity to broadcast their opinion without the approval an authority figure.
With greater freedom to share their opinion and stories, it became easier to bring the hidden secrets to the surface. The ideas that would be rejected and banned by pro-military dogmatic media found their expression in the space of social media.
Journalist who were fired from their jobs from television news channels found the way to reach their audience via the route of Social Media. The biased reporting from TV channels pushed many of the regular viewers away from them. They adopted social media as a source of news for them.
The powerful impact of social media in the realm of politics can be imagined by the steps people in power took to control over it.
When the elites realized the threats social media brought to their long-held dominance, they started efforts to regulate the platforms too.
When traditional methods of controlling conventional media did not bring desired results, they resorted to more aggressive means of control. The dissenters of the power holders including politicians, public influencers and journalists were arrested and threatened for theirs and their families' lives. Those who rejected to surrender they and their families suffered torture from the elites.
The power bearers, finding it arduous to control the spread of dissension on social media, moved a step forward and began to ban several social media platforms.
Costing millions of Dollars to Pakistan’s economy a nationwide firewall was built only to secure the corruption of the elites. Sharing videos and audios through WhatsApp became troublesome. Facebook and YouTube also experienced outages and down time. Former Twitter, the X, has been inaccessible to the masses for several months.
In other words, with regards to politics, the impact brought by social media was extremely powerful. It shook the foundations of long-held dominance of the overlords. It became a source to reshape the mind-set of the public. Had social media not been present today, we as nation would still be believing the masked faces to be our only saviours .
Putting the debate of the kind of impact, positive or negative, social media has brought in our lives generally, no one can deny its power to influence any realm of a nation’s life. If used wisely, it becomes a weapon to defeat any foes.
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The post is my participation for Hl-featured contest week 162 edition .