Abstract
Uncovering the truth in Afghanistan’s constricted media landscape is more difficult but equally more important than ever.
Afghanistan is ripe for the growth of inaccurate information. Restrictions on the media are increasing, there’s a lack of access to information and hundreds of local media outlets are being closed due to tightening limitations on free speech and cutbacks on foreign funding. Thousands of Afghan media workers fled the country when the Taliban arrived in Kabul in 2021, as Index has reported on, and there are personal biases to consider - many people are unhappy with the Islamic Emirate’s return to power.
Haroun Rahimi, an Afghan academic and author currently based in the USA, said he regularly came across both disinformation and misinformation from all sides - online and in-person.
Since August 2021, Rahimi and others have repeatedly pointed to examples of incorrect or misleading reporting from major international media outlets and new Afghan outfits based abroad.
A Taliban member celebrates the year anniversary of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in front of the US Embassy in Kabul on 15 August 2022
CREDIT: Abaca Press / Alamy
One high-profile example comes from The New York Times. A year before the Taliban actually banned women from higher education, it published a story claiming that women would not be allowed into Kabul University based on a tweet from someone claiming to be the university’s chancellor. The paper eventually had to issue a lengthy correction, saying it had believed the tweets to be genuine and that government officials had not replied to its requests for comment.
In a report about a young man in Kabul who had been tortured and killed by the Taliban for being gay, The Guardian used a picture of Safiullah Ahmadi. Ahmadi was very much alive and posted a video online, threatening to sue the British paper and saying nothing about the report was true. And The Washington Post had to issue a correction to a story which claimed the Taliban had voided thousands of divorces for Afghan women after it was called out for inaccuracies.
Rahimi said that although fake news and disinformation were global problems, Afghanistan has been especially affected since the fall of the Western-backed Islamic Republic.
During the 20-year Western occupation of the country, Afghanistan’s press freedom ranking increased. Although it was still ranked by the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index as 128th out of 179 countries, in 2013 the country outranked many others in the region - including Iran, Pakistan and Turkmenistan. However, since the Taliban took over there have been frequent reports of journalists being detained, beaten and tortured by the authorities.
A shrinking media space has created a situation where bias and unsubstantiated claims permeate social and traditional media, Rahimi explained. He said pro-Islamic Emirate groups “highlight successes and try to downplay the shortcomings and failures” of the Taliban-led government, while those who oppose them try to “build the narrative that everything is going horribly wrong in the country”.
Rahimi said both sides unquestioningly promoted and spread stories that fitted their respective narratives without making the effort to verify their validity.
Michael Kugelman, the South Asia Institute director at the US-based Wilson Centre, picked up on the dangers of this trend in a tweet, writing: “Lots of mis-info is floating around social media on the Taliban. Much of it accuses the group of doing bad things it hasn’t actually done. This runs the risk of making some news consumers, once aware of this mis-info, shrug off all the reports on Taliban brutalities that ARE true.”
Rahimi said he tended to ignore fake news and misinformation to avoid drawing more attention to it. However, even when he does point out factual inaccuracies, it does little to change people’s minds.
“The sentiment doesn’t go away … The ‘emotional truth’ is still there,” he said.
When it comes to major international media outlets misreporting, Rahimi said he was disappointed but not surprised. Greater numbers of foreign journalists are either being barred from the country or facing greater difficulties obtaining press visas, meaning few have an on-the-ground presence. This creates a situation where journalists who lack a deep knowledge of Afghanistan are being assigned to the country. They are more susceptible to intermediaries and sources who, according to Rahimi, often have “a very coloured vision of the country”.
Rachel Pulfer is the executive director at Journalists for Human Rights, an organisation that aims to strengthen human rights reporting. She said ongoing cutbacks and layoffs across the media industry made it more difficult for outlets to properly vet every story - especially in countries such as Afghanistan.
“Often, fact-checking is the first thing to be cut,” she said, calling disinformation “the issue of our time” and insisting that journalists should be given the right tools to uncover false reports.
Pulfer explained that those who traded in disinformation specifically sought out “divisive issues” and searched for things that “seem just believable enough” to base their campaigns or stories around.
For Saad Mohseni, the CEO of Afghanistan’s largest private media network, the Moby Group, the current situation has forced his cadre of journalists to be extra diligent about what they report.
“Our journalists in the country go to great lengths not to run a story until it’s verified,” he said.
Because Moby staff still live in Afghanistan, they know that the cost of reporting false or unproven news can be extremely high.
The Committee to Protect Journalists said intelligence officials were a growing threat to free media in the country, with several journalists reporting that they had been arrested and interrogated.
Mohseni agreed that there was no shortage of people who deliberately spread false narratives.
“Today’s reality is probably unacceptable for many of them, so these people create things that suit their agendas,” he said.
He added that local and international journalists must take biases into account when they vet their sources. With discussions around Afghanistan becoming so polarised, he said the trend of misleading information was exacerbating the problem of people being trapped in ideological bubbles.
Mohseni believes they can “no longer make a distinction between reality and what their version of the truth may be”.
At a time when more than 28 million Afghans require humanitarian and protection assistance, accurate information is vital.