In an age where pixels often substitute for power, a single smartphone can now expose what decades of silence tried to bury.
On a blistering afternoon in the arid landscape of Balochistan, a young couple, Bano Bibi and Ahsan Ullah, were brutally killed for choosing each other over tribal decrees. Once upon a time, such honour killings would vanish into the folds of unrecorded history, quietly absolved by local jirgas and ignored by state machinery. But not anymore! This time, someone captured the event. And in the aftermath, someone posted it. Within hours, what was meant to be buried became a burning headline. The hashtags began to trend. The pressure began to mount. The government, reluctantly, responded under the immense national and international pressure.
In a society where power has long been preserved through silence, social media is now scripting a different kind of resistance.
This event is not an exception; it is part of a growing pattern that signals a tectonic shift in how justice is demanded, and sometimes delivered, in Pakistan. In a society where power has long been preserved through silence, social media is now scripting a different kind of resistance. What was once whispered in drawing rooms or wept over behind closed doors is now broadcast, amplified, and archived in the public domain.
In our recent Op-Ed, “Pakistan’s Growing Digital Citizenship,” we examined how the proliferation of digital platforms has enabled ordinary citizens to challenge extraordinary injustice. Nowhere is this transformation more visible than in the exposure of honour-based crimes. Pakistan remains one of the countries most affected by such violence, with nearly one-fifth of the global reported honour killings occurring within its borders. But today, these acts are increasingly difficult to hide. Smartphones have become a modern-day witness that speaks without fear and reaches audiences that no lone individual could.
Before the rise of digital media, victims of honour-based crimes were often reduced to footnotes in police ledgers or shadows in local folklore. Traditional structures, patriarchal, tribal, and feudal, ensured silence. Judicial inertia ensured invisibility. But today, digital networks bypass both. When a crime is captured and shared, it no longer remains a private affair. It becomes public memory. It becomes a protest.
Consider how swiftly these digital acts of witness can provoke institutional response. Law enforcement, once complicit through omission or collusion, is increasingly cornered into action. Judges, previously shrouded in procedural delay, find their benches under scrutiny. Ministers, wary of electoral backlash, issue statements they might never have made in the absence of public pressure. While social media may not yet ensure justice, it does ensure accountability, or at least the threat of it.
What we are witnessing is the democratisation of outrage, and with it, the decentralisation of justice. Yet the implications go far beyond the exposure of individual crimes. They point to a more profound and possibly disruptive possibility – the revamping of Pakistan’s security and judicial architecture from the outside in.
For too long, our institutions have operated in a vacuum, immune to scrutiny, insulated by red tape, and buffered by socio-political hierarchies. The gap between state and citizen has not just been administrative; it has been emotional, ethical, and epistemological. People did not just fear the police; they distrusted them. They did not just avoid courts; they abandoned them. But now, social media is challenging these dynamics. It is forcing state institutions to remember what they were built for – protection, not persecution.
In the digital realm, victims can narrate their trauma before it is reframed by power. Families of victims can name names before evidence is erased. Whistleblowers can leak documents, share images, or release audio recordings that would never make it past editorial filters or bureaucratic thresholds. This is not merely a technological advancement; it is a narrative subversion. It is truth-telling with a megaphone.
But there is a caveat. As powerful as social media has become, it is not a substitute for systemic reform. Virality does not equal justice. Hashtags fade. Algorithms change. What remains is the need for institutional introspection. The police must become proactive agents of law, not passive instruments of custom. Courts must prioritise gender-based violence with the urgency it demands. And above all, the state must stop seeing digital evidence as a threat to its image and start recognising it as a lifeline for its legitimacy.
To harness the full potential of digital citizenship, Pakistan must also invest in digital literacy. For every video that exposes a crime, some trolls distort it. For every woman who dares to speak up, there are coordinated campaigns to shame her into silence. The promise of social media must not be allowed to drown in its toxicity. Regulatory frameworks that uphold free expression while curbing hate speech and misinformation are not just desirable, they are essential.
It is also time for academic institutions, media houses, and civil society to take a more active role in documenting and analyzing the digital footprints of resistance. The honour killing of Bano Bibi and Ahsan Ullah should not just be a trending topic; it should be archived as part of our collective struggle for justice. Each case exposed online should feed into a repository of legal evidence, policy reform, and educational curriculum that dismantles the cultural scaffolding of violence. There are no shortcuts to social transformation. But there are catalysts. Social media has emerged as one. It may not be the courtroom, but it is the corridor to it. It may not offer verdicts, but it offers visibility. And sometimes, visibility is all a victim needs to survive, if not the crime, then the forgetting. Social media has exposed tech-illiterate tribal leaders and feudal lords globally, in a way to exert pressure on governments or judicial systems to act locally. This also serves to educate them that the world is not the same as the one in which they were raised. It has changed and is transforming rapidly.
In this moment of flux, Pakistan stands at a crossroads. It can cling to its outdated mechanisms of silence and status quo. Or it can embrace the uncomfortable but necessary tide of transparency, driven by millions of digital citizens who refuse to look away. One phone, one post, one voice at a time, they are rewriting the rules of engagement between power and the people. And perhaps, finally, between justice and those long denied it.
The first author is a Professor of English at Riphah International University, Lahore. He is a lead guest editor at Emerald and Springer publishing.
The second author is an Assistant Professor of English at Govt. Graduate College for Women, Samanabad, Lahore