Hate Speech and Media Information Literacy in the Digital Age: A Case Study of 2018 Elections in Pakistan

In the recent general election of Pakistan (2018), according to Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), 58 million people were using internet. The emergence of technology and social media has completely changed the trends of running political campaigns as compared to past when politicians used to reach the public through organizing processions, pamphlets and door-to-door campaign. Twitter and Facebook allowed politicians to reach public directly and convey their ideology. This has brought a major shift in voting campaigns of leading political parties. This election witnessed the major role of social media as all mainstream liberal, conservative and religious parties were very focused to run their campaign though social media besides the traditional mediums of campaign. this study examines how three mainstream political parties namely, Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N), Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI) and the Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP) utilized Facebook and Twitter for their election campaigns in 2018. To what extent did the element of hate speech exist in their Tweets and Facebook posts? What strategies of political parties social media cells adopted to launch their campaigns? In addition the study intends to assess the implications of hate speech and the level of Media and Information Literacy (MIL) among the people during the 2018 general election.