Computational propaganda campaigns by domestic political actors in Pakistan on Facebook

Computational propaganda campaigns came into the limelight after the 2016 US elections and since then the research has predominately focused on foreign influence operations across the US, UK, and EU. Computational propaganda campaigns in the Global South remain understudied. Therefore, we shift our focus towards Pakistan and examine computational propaganda campaigns by domestic political actors. Utilizing Facebook digital trace data, we track 400 hashtag campaigns by domestic political actors to analyze: (1) the dissemination patterns of political information, (2) the role bot and spam accounts play in the dissemination of political information, (3) the nature of hashtag campaigns, and (4) the key initiators and amplifiers during the hashtag campaigns. Our research contributions include: (1) we validate the findings in the previous literature regarding presence of bots and increased coordinated activity during the emergence of political events and show that the most central bridging positions within these campaigns are held by organized spam accounts. (2) Our analysis of multi-lingual hashtag campaigns uncovers that language and political context play a pivot role in dissemination of political information. (3) Tracing campaigns across several years, we find that automated and inauthentic activity intensifies around electoral contests, rising to roughly two-fifths of monthly posts by the 2024 general election, when spam accounts came to outnumber verified institutional actors. Together, these findings characterize computational propaganda in Pakistan as a domestically driven, linguistically stratified, and as an issue/event-driven phenomenon.