[waqasx]

I dont want political asylum because of many reasons, i have my parents and my family back home. I am not asking Twitter to side with me, you have read my post, you can clearly see that misinfo is being spread about me. These are verifiable lies. They are verifiably dangerous after basic scrutiny, i am asking Twitter to do their job that they already claim that they do. That is provide a space that is safer from harassment and targeted attacks like this one.

[natch]

Making Twitter safe will not make you safe. It would absolutely be great if Twitter could do more, but the true issue lies elsewhere.

Unless you recognize this, and accept that you don’t always get everything you want, then you may be living in a dangerous delusion.

You don’t want to leave Pakistan, and you also presumably don’t want to compromise your principles, and you also want to not be killed for your journalism… perhaps it is wise to consider whether you can realistically have all of these things you want, when the truth is you probably can’t.

All that being said, I don’t fault you for wanting Twitter to do more. But for your own well being you should not consider that the only angle you need to work on here.

[MichaelCollins]

> You don’t want to leave Pakistan

My read is that he's in New York, but has family still in Pakistan.

[natch]

> I dont want political asylum because of many reasons

Good point but but he apparently does not even want the relative safety of being able to stay away from Pakistan. We all have family in various places, that’s a given. He could also try to get them out.

Making Pakistan safe for free speech seems beyond optimistic for now.

[watwut]

The ask here is not for twitter on itself be some kind of safe place. It is for twitter as a company or platform to stop enabling this sort of thing. Or at least, enable it less.

[crusty]

(TRIGGER WARNING: I write long sentences.)

"Making Twitter safe will not make you safe. It would absolutely be great if Twitter could do more, but the true issue lies elsewhere."

Along with the rest of the reply, this is some 100% GRADE A cynicism right here.

To this cynicism - clearly there's a danger to a named journalist just from the 'offended' party reading the product of their journalism (in this case Twitter posts or posts they distribute via Twitter posts), but if as the OP suggests, the government is using Twitter to produce an erroneous record and public justification for extra-judicial violence against journalists and political foes, and that without this ability to use Twitter to manipulate the narrative surrounding an individual target, they would not be as emboldened to perpetrate the violence against that individual, then the use of Twitter by the harassing party here is clearly enabling violence, moving the risk from a general threat to a political journalist's safety to a clear and present danger to the individual.

Waving proverbial hands at this by noting that journalism can be dangerous if the party that doesn't like it can see your journalism, and therefore, promoting, distributing, or publishing it via Twitter isn't Twitter's problem because the threat arises from the the distribution in general, not the medium, ignores the role the author suggests Twitter plays in the manipulation of the public sentiment towards targeted individuals for the purpose of eliminating a critical level of moral outrage that exists as potential blowback and might otherwise provide some degree of safe cover and prevent the extra-judicial violence the 'aggrieved' wish to subject the target to.

Aslo: I'm surprised Twitter doesn't have rules that restrict the use of "parody" accounts against non-verified (or non-verfiable) accounts. I can't imagine that Twitter in the US hasn't previously been confronted with this issue by high-schoolers bullying and or cyber-stalking peers on Twitter with anonymous "parody" accounts.

Back to the cynicism: "Unless you recognize this, and accept that you don’t always get everything you want, then you may be living in a dangerous delusion.

You don’t want to leave Pakistan, and you also presumably don’t want to compromise your principles, and you also want to not be killed for your journalism… perhaps it is wise to consider whether you can realistically have all of these things you want, when the truth is you probably can’t.

All that being said, I don’t fault you for wanting Twitter to do more. But for your own well being you should not consider that the only angle you need to work on here."

What couldn't this be applied to? Think you're child's school bus operator is being negligent by not installing seat belts? Sure, you complaining might help, but the real fault lies with you for letting her get on the bus.

Think the coal mine you work for is shirking their safety responsibilities? Sure, you can complain, but the real problem is you bring willing to go down that mine.

Think too many 737-Maxes are falling out of the sky? Go ahead and complain, but the real fault is yours for flying.

Danger is just standing over here swinging it's arms (and maybe moving around when you aren't looking), it's not dangers' fault of you get in it's way.

[natch]

Good comment. Unusual perhaps on HN (my cynicism again), I actually read it.

I mostly agree. You have a very good point and make it well.

Especially the part about how a better set of Twitter policies and enforcement against this kind of targeting could help to provide cover for hard hitting journalism and thereby contribute to positive impact by that journalism, helping change things for the better.

Fair enough, although then they could also ban Twitter as some countries do.

My main point was that aside from anything Twitter should do, he should also protect himself. The same point is valid in any of the other examples you listed. I won’t fly on a 737 MAX. I’m not going to work in a coal mine. Etc. Of course I will take some worthwhile risks, each one decided in context. All of us do.

Yes it would be good and helpful not just to this guy but to all journalism and to the general public who benefit from light being shone on stuff, for journalists, or anyone for that matter, to be shielded from this kind of nonsense. Even though it may be easier said than done, Twitter should try to do it to the extent that is workable.

They have lots of rules preventing an individual from harassing others. They don’t seem to have rules preventing an entire system of ideologically corrupt people from targeting a person who wants to call out corruption. Again it’s hard though, algorithmically and at scale.

In the meantime he should take steps to get free from that place.

> Danger is just standing over here swinging it's arms (and maybe moving around when you aren't looking), it's not dangers' fault of you get in it's way.

Absolutely. Of course if an unreasonable danger is intentionally or irresponsibly created by people, then those people are at fault, but the general situation in life is you don’t go around walking off buildings and wondering why there is no safety net. Yeah safety nets are great but they are not always practical. At scale, this safety net on Twitter is tremendously hard to do, although maybe they should make a special effort for problematic situations like zealotry and corruption.

[logicalmonster]

Like many people here, I don't know enough about Pakistani politics to weigh in on the objective truth of this situation one way or the other. I would only make 4 small comments.

1) You claim these are verifiable lies. From your perspective that is the case as (unless you're a programmed sleeper agent) you're in position to know the truth about whether you're an agent of some foreign government or not. However, from a neutral or 3rd party perspective, this seems a bit like a he-said/she-said kind of case. And from your perspective, disproving this would be hard as you'd seem to have to prove a negative "I'm not an agent" claim, which is kind of hard to do.

2) A personal opinion, but it would probably be very helpful to your case if you can make a clear, bullet-point list of the alleged verifiable lies, who told them and their position in the Pakistani government, and your rebuttal to their claim. I read your piece and checked out your links, but these are all buried under a wall of text that many people won't have the attention span to process given the format.

3) One of the problems with Twitter is that they try and involve themselves in really tough subjective cases of truthiness. I'm not sure that Twitter trying to fact-check and remove what you believe are lies would be the best outcome here. If I were to give a suggestion to Twitter on how to handle this, the best thing Twitter could probably do would be to either temporarily verify him, or create some kind of temporary "At Risk" badge given to a limited number of people in dicy situations like this to bring attention to their cause so they can't be summarily disappeared without a trial.

4) To any journalists reading this, I hope Waqas' story gives you a renewed appreciation for not trusting government claims at face value. Whether his story is true or not, many journalists seem to too often rush to print government claims about anything and everything as gospel. A journalists' job isn't to be a tape recorder for government officials and merely print their quotes, you've got to dive into the background of their claims and consider the other side. If government officials claim X is a foreign agent, you should consider every angle and claim.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

If not on Twitter, won't these lies be spread elsewhere?

It sounds like you believe you're in real danger. If so, you have bigger problems.

You mention the comedian and the journalist, and you try to paint this as a giant conspiracy. But what you've laid out in the article seems like it could easily just be people being morons and taking the government's word for everything.

You also don't even mention what you want Twitter to actually do.

Are they supposed to ban those accounts? Are they supposed to label those Tweets as untrue?

While this sounds like an improvement - and probably what they should do - I don't see how this actually helps with your larger problem of potential life and death...

[vorpalhex]

So you get your wish, Twitter bans a bunch of tweets.

Your life is still in danger. You haven't changed that situation. You still need to either flee or make plans for your sudden passing.

[dcow]

I’ll admit it’s not clear to me as an outsider to this conflict whether there is clear misinformation or whether this is a matter of political perspective (not because I’m sympathetic to what’s happened in Pakistan, rather because of they style in which you communicated in the post). It is only through discussing this here that I think the tractable request to just remove misinformation is becoming clear. The whole thing about comedy accounts is distracting since parody is allowed, as you know. So I was left confused wether there is factual misinformation, or just a gravely damaging narrative being painted.

If I may, it might help for you to clearly lead with the factually incorrect things being said about you and then dive into supporting evidence to back the misinformation claim.

Still, part of my comment was a serious reminder that Twitter is not a a real authority even if they pretend to be one in fair-weather and if your life is credibly in danger you should seek people and organizations who can actually help you protect it. I truly hope this site can help you find the needed connections.