A local court on Monday acquitted a man who was arrested for spreading misinformation that reportedly provoked riots in the UK earlier this month.
The decision came less than a week after Farhan Asif, a 32-year-old web developer and so-called journalist, was arrested in a raid on his home in Lahore.
He was charged with cyberterrorism by Lahore police.
After a hearing on Monday (today), the judge ordered Farhan’s acquittal in the case. He told the judge that he deleted his social media post only six hours after realizing that it was not correct.
Rana Rizwan, a defence lawyer, told reporters that the Federal Investigative Agency (FIA) told the judge that they had no evidence to prove that he was guilty of intentionally spreading misinformation.
Farhan Asif was taken into custody from Lahore for being involved in spreading fake news, which sparked far-right racist riots in the United Kingdom a few weeks ago after a fatal stabbing incident at a children’s dance class resulted in the death of three young girls in Southport, England.
Background
On August 8, BBC’s Marianna Spring reported about the involvement of a Lahore man in spreading misinformation regarding the Southport stabbing.
The BBC report was followed by an ITV report stating that Farhan Asif was the owner of the website which misquoted the name of the stabber as Ali Al-Shakati and declared him an immigrant from Syria, who had arrived in the UK on a boat. Later, a UK court announced that the name of the teenager charged with the murders was Axel Rudakubana, who turned out to be a British national.
ITV said that they couldn’t find out who is the real owner of the website but Farhan Asif has “a significant role in a network of news websites that have promoted falsehoods.”
Dawn’s sources in Pakistan said that the person identified in the ITV report was a freelancer working for Channel3Now, which collects crime-related news from the UK and the USA and republishes the stories for the sake of clicks and advertisements.
The BBC report also cracked down on people attached to Channel3Now and asserted that it was actually “a commercial operation attempting to aggregate crime news while making money on social media”. The analysis of the website also showed that all the the freelance writers were recruited from several countries, including Pakistan and India.
The BBC report elaborated that there are “more than 30” people in the US, UK, Pakistan and India who work for the site, which usually recruits freelancers.
According to ITV, Channel3Now regularly publishes sensational news stories under the garb of being an American-style TV channel.
However, BBC quoted Kevin as saying that Farhan Asif in particular was not involved in the false Southport story, which the site has publicly apologised for, and blamed there UK based team for that.
Wider disinformation network
Even though the report speculated that the website had links with Russia, it could not come up with a proof for that. Marianna Spring stated, “I did not find any evidence to substantiate claims that Channel3Now’s misinformation could be linked to the Russian state. [A] person claiming to be from Channel3Now‘s management told me that the publication of the false name “shouldn’t have happened, but it was an error, not intentional”.
Atika noted that there are chances of website be linked to Srivastava Group, an Indian company that ran a vast network of anti-Pakistan fake news websites, which was unearthed by the EU DisinfoLab in a 2019 investigation.
