Pakistan ranks last (148th out of 148 countries) in the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report 2025. Women’s participation in the digital economy remains constrained due to structural barriers like digital illiteracy, access and affordability, lack of safety and mobility, and overall restrictive gender norms and socio-cultural barriers.
The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) establish that companies have a responsibility to prevent and address human rights harms, including TFGBV. The OECD’s Bridging the Digital Divide report highlights how social norms and biases shape digital participation.
Online abuse is not merely a social issue—it is a human rights violation that silences women’s voices and restricts their civic participation. In Pakistan, these constraints operate simultaneously—restricting not just access, but also skills development, economic opportunity, and agency—thereby requiring integrated policy responses across connectivity, education, and labour markets.
Social media in Pakistan is not just enabling communication; it is being weaponised to discipline and control women’s participation in public life. Digital platforms amplify misogyny by enabling coordinated trolling, sexualised abuse, and disinformation, which collectively reinforce patriarchal norms, silence women journalists and politicians, and restrict their role in the digital public sphere.
Online gender-based violence (GBV) is widespread. According to Digital Rights Foundation Pakistan, 38% of women globally experience online abuse, while 85% witness it. Women politicians, journalists, and content creators are targeted the most. This abuse—ranging from misogynistic slurs and harassment to doxxing and non-consensual imagery—is categorised as Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence (TFGBV).
In countries like Pakistan, gender-based violence (GBV) is yet to be fully treated as a crime and benefits from socio-cultural normative privilege, victim-blaming, the absence of structured regulation, and a weak rule of law. Misplaced, misinterpreted, and misused religious quotations further intensify discrimination and marginalisation of women in public and digital spaces.
TFGBV is reportedly more sexualised, including threats of sexual violence. Over the past decade, rising political polarisation in Pakistan has intensified gendered online violence. Women journalists and politicians are disproportionately targeted with sexualised abuse, threats, and disinformation.
Weak moderation systems, particularly in local languages such as Urdu and Punjabi, allow abuse to proliferate unchecked
Female politicians continue to face sexist memes, altered videos, and manipulated images, alongside moral policing. A similar pattern is observed for women journalists, where, rather than engaging with their work, online discourse frequently shifts to moral judgement—policing their bodies, clothing, and personal lives.
Worse still, a substantial number of women not only join in but at times lead such misogynistic moral policing and smear campaigns. This reflects a broader pattern where digital platforms are used to enforce gender hierarchies and delegitimise women’s presence in public discourse.
This phenomenon—digital patriarchy—mirrors traditional systems of control while demonstrating that technology is not neutral. Platform features such as anonymity, virality, and algorithmic amplification enable networked misogyny at scale. Gendered disinformation and smear campaigns are deliberately deployed to distort public perception and undermine women’s credibility.
Anonymity on social media platforms encourages trolls to hurl sexual slurs, rape threats, character assassination, body shaming, and moral policing at women journalists and media persons. Such gendered disinformation, hate, and smear campaigns against women journalists, in particular, are used as tools to generate false narratives to influence public perception and delegitimise women’s online presence.
Digital spaces were expected to expand inclusion for women to voice opinions, engage, question unequal power structures, and, above all, participate safely in public space while overcoming the security and mobility constraints of the offline world. Unfortunately, online spaces are being shaped by regressive societal norms in Pakistan as well. For women journalists, social media platforms are increasingly becoming hostile spaces where visibility and expression invite punishment.
Coordinated trolling, sexualised abuse, and smear campaigns are not accidental; they are deliberate tools used to discredit and silence women who dare to challenge. Instead of engaging with their reporting, attackers target their character, morality, and personal lives—sending a clear message: women who speak publicly will be publicly scrutinised and policed. This is not just harassment; it is a systemic effort to push women out of journalism and reclaim public discourse as a male-dominated space.
TFGBV, online misogyny, and toxicity are not inevitable. They are produced and sustained by the very design and governance gaps of digital platforms. Social media platforms have a responsibility to curb TFGBV, but most platforms do not have features to assess and monitor the gendered impacts of targeted abuse and misuse.
Due to monetisation, algorithms reward outrage and virality, amplifying hateful content faster than factual reporting. Platforms often hide behind language gaps and inadequate sensitivity to different dialects of local languages to deflect from the absence of effective monitoring, reporting, and grievance mechanisms that can ensure timely takedowns. Weak moderation systems, particularly in local languages such as Urdu and Punjabi, allow abuse to proliferate unchecked.
At the same time, anonymity and impunity embolden perpetrators, while organised actors exploit platforms to scale harassment. These dynamics are further reinforced by Pakistan’s patriarchal social context, where offline norms of controlling women’s voices seamlessly migrate online. Together, they create an ecosystem in which misogyny is normalised rather than challenged.
Unchecked and coordinated smear campaigns not only normalise moral policing of women’s appearance but, through collective participation, amplify toxic social norms that make victim-blaming socially acceptable rather than abusive
Internalised misogyny complicates this landscape. Women themselves, consciously and/or unconsciously, participate in reinforcing patriarchal norms by engaging in moral policing, victim-blaming, or amplifying abusive narratives. Internalised misogyny is rooted in years of socio-cultural and religious conditioning within patriarchal systems, leading some women to believe it is acceptable to police other women’s behaviour online, question their credibility, or amplify narratives that shame outspoken female journalists.
Smear campaigns led or facilitated by women on digital platforms lend legitimacy to abuse and blur the line between resistance and reinforcement. This reflects the deep social conditioning embedded within patriarchal systems. While it does not negate structural inequality, it underscores how deeply these norms are internalised, making solutions not only technological or regulatory, but also cultural.
Yet again, another harassment and smear campaign against journalist Gharida Farooqi during the Islamabad talks in 2026 demonstrates how social media and digital platforms in Pakistan are being used as weapons to police women’s bodies and dress choices rather than engage with their journalism. Instead of focusing on her reporting, large sections of Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook discourse fixated on her choice of clothing and engaged in body shaming.
Most of the circulating images were doxed, morphed, unconsented, and AI-altered, indicating the sexual perversion of a coordinated group of individuals, including fellow journalists—some of them female—and political trolls aligned with PTI. This AI-manipulated digital content constitutes targeted digital bullying aimed at mocking and shaming her.
This smear campaign followed a familiar pattern of dress policing and body shaming. Her dress was framed as ‘indecent’, ‘culturally inappropriate’, ‘provocative’, and/or ‘attention-seeking’, reinforcing the patriarchal idea that women in public spaces must conform to moral expectations or invite harassment.
This was not the first instance of any political party engaging in trolling or moral policing of women. However, PTI has been particularly prominent in TFGBV, especially in sexualised abuse. PTI trolls and abusive vloggers once again amplified the campaign against Gharida Farooqi with inappropriate and sexualised images in thumbnails, vlogs, and tweets.
This pattern, unfortunately, traces back to the tenure of former Prime Minister Imran Khan, whose statements on rape, morality, women’s behaviour in public spaces, and even mobile phone usage have played a significant role in reinforcing and legitimising a broader culture of victim-blaming and digital misogyny in Pakistan. He questioned the timing of a woman driving at night when she was raped on a motorway in Lahore in front of her children.
He attributed men’s inability to control themselves in cases of sexual violence to women’s dress, stating that men are not robots. He repeatedly linked Western culture, media exposure, and even mobile phone usage to rising divorce rates and moral decline, arguing that vulgarity leads to the breakdown of family systems. Such statements, even when later clarified, reinforced a narrative where male violence is framed as reactive and women’s bodies as triggers, thereby shifting the discourse from accountability of perpetrators to regulation of women.
The reactions to the campaign against Gharida Farooqi were not limited to fringe voices; they were amplified across platforms through viral posts, memes, and comment threads that normalised scrutiny of her body as legitimate public discourse. What makes this episode particularly revealing and disturbing is the role of internalised misogyny in sustaining, amplifying, and condoning such online harassment.
Alongside male trolls, many women—alleged journalists and otherwise—participated in criticising her appearance, moral policing, questioning her decency, and justifying the online abuse. Social media comments and posts reflected how moral policing becomes communal, with women echoing narratives that equate professional credibility with modesty and bodily conformity.
This convergence of harassment, body shaming, and internalised misogyny creates a powerful disciplinary mechanism. It not only humiliates the individual journalist but also signals to all women in media that, irrespective of their journalistic credentials, their bodies will be subjected to surveillance, judgement, and abuse.
Digital platforms thus play a dual role: they host and amplify misogyny while enabling its monetisation and virality. Smear campaigns become profitable through engagement-driven algorithms, normalising abuse as both entertainment and political strategy. If digital spaces are to fulfil their promise of inclusion and freedom of expression, urgent accountability is required—from platforms, policymakers, and society. Addressing digital patriarchy demands stronger regulation, platform responsibility, and cultural change to dismantle the structures that enable TFGBV and silence women’s voices.
Unchecked and coordinated smear campaigns not only normalise moral policing of women’s appearance but, through collective participation, amplify toxic social norms that make victim-blaming socially acceptable rather than abusive. TFGBV and smear campaigns, when repurposed into trolling, moral policing, and body shaming of women journalists and politicians, push them to self-censor or withdraw from online spaces. These dynamics contribute to broader social regression by legitimising victim-blaming, reinforcing regressive gender norms, and ultimately complicating efforts towards meaningful social change and gender equality.