The worldwide spread of smartphone culture and the increasing numbers of Android software applications in the world have changed the conventional outlook of the international system. The growing fascination with the multidimensional usages of smartphone technology has resulted in a global appreciation of the nations’ newly emerged and digitally-supported societal infrastructures.

The overwhelming effects of dramatically-risen smartphone culture have transformed the traditional social landscape of states under varying political administrations. This societal transformation has facilitated people to modernize their regular communication mechanisms in parallel with gaining unrestricted access to the free flow of information. The combination of both factors has made smartphone technology an essential part of daily life and raised public demands for high-speed internet around the globe, and people started considering unrestricted access to online information as their legitimate and fundamental right. In this way, the global rise of smartphone culture has empowered societies in multiple ways. However, the existing benefits of this digitalization cannot be separated from certain challenges, such as the spread of disinformation, propaganda and conspiracy theories.

The growing fascination with the multidimensional usages of smartphone technology has resulted in a global appreciation of the nations’ newly emerged and digitally-supported societal infrastructures.

An accurate picture of this scenario can be accessed from Pakistan’s case, where the increasing reliance of the population on the digitally-supported new social interaction platforms and the mushroomed growth of interpersonal communication channels in the smartphone culture have become the government’s serious concerns. The government’s formal decision-making bodies have started sharing their apprehensions on the worse impact of this unregulated smartphone culture on society while accepting the nation’s vulnerabilities in the contemporary digital age.

The widespread promotion of numerous social media applications and multiplying malicious tendencies of people for using prominent communication channels such as Facebook, X (previously known as Twitter), Telegram, TikTok, and WhatsApp have become standard social practices in Pakistan. The growing unregulated usage of these social media channels raised several security challenges for the government. The unregulated growth of these social media applications has led users to obtain unrestricted and unlimited information about the international system’s political, social, economic, and strategic dimensions. This trend has compromised the validity and accuracy of the acquired information from different online sources. Without having an authentic verification mechanism, the accessed information from different social media channels has created an overwhelming propaganda wave in Pakistan, which has started affecting the Pakistani nation.

The countrywide spread of disinformation and conspiracy theories is due to the low literacy rate and lack of sufficient ethical framework for the newly emerged digital world. This development has given rise to the phenomenon of digital terrorism, which generally refers to the misuse of digital technologies for the spread of various propaganda material, extremist sentiments, radicalized views, and socially violent behaviors under certain religious and political slogans.

The growing unregulated usage of these social media channels raised several security challenges for the government.

In the debate on digital terrorism, YouTube has become a critical social media source by generating different patterns of misinformation and psychological warfare to cultivate a specific arrangement of public opinion based on certain manipulated facts and inaccurate sets of information. These disinformation YouTube campaigns are critical in introducing and promoting specific patterns of fake news and conspiracy theories supporting particular specific narratives. An extensive advancement of imprecise and inexact narratives targets the country’s national image, which generally results in multileveled social unrest, economic crisis, and political instability in the domestic system.

Under the Western-influenced slogans of freedom of speech in a countrywide culture of digital illiteracy, the unauthorized broadcasting features of social media reporting, exclusively through various YouTube videos, target the country’s mainstream youth. The appealing conversations and convincing visual effects of such reporting generally provide a counter-narrative to the government’s position on critical domestic and international political issues.

These disinformation YouTube campaigns are critical in introducing and promoting specific patterns of fake news and conspiracy theories supporting particular specific narratives.

In this way, due to the high levels of digital illiteracy, Pakistan’s society faces the issues of ideological and political polarization, which originates from the increasing digital tendencies of the people. The prevailing trends of multifaceted polarizations of society have given rise to fake social media accounts to advance specific political agendas. Promoting such agendas in society emphasizes common people for manipulating public opinion without estimating its impacts on the country’s national image. Thus, it is appropriate to maintain that the phenomenon of YouTube journalism has prevailed in Pakistan, where individuals share their views and analyses about various political developments without adequate knowledge of politics and journalism. The opinion-based contents of numerous YouTube channels sometimes pursue a specific agenda for advancing certain misleading facts and manipulated information in society, which gives space to the persistent growth of conspiracy theories among the general public.

These disinformation YouTube campaigns are critical in introducing and promoting specific patterns of fake news and conspiracy theories supporting particular specific narratives.

Additionally, the sensational reporting style of different Vloggers is heavily connected with the monetizing benefits, raising the question of accountability. The unchecked growth of YouTube journalism in Pakistan is mainly associated with the lack of accountability and the absence of the government’s legitimate policy framework concerning the mushroomed growth of YouTube channels in Pakistan. Moreover, the lack of professional journalistic traits in society has compromised the integrity of journalism in Pakistan.

Therefore, government authorities must design conceptually strong and practically applicable measures to control the countrywide spread of unregulated smartphone culture by generating multileveled awareness campaigns about the constructive and positive usage of social media channels. Additionally, an active collaboration with the specific nations fighting analogous security threats could effectively improve the government’s existing vision for upgrading the nation’s digital capabilities.

Apart from launching multileveled awareness campaigns based on an optimistic and pragmatic approach, an exclusive focus on the government’s law enforcement mechanism seeks serious attention from the formal state authorities.

So, the Islamabad-based formal decision-makers are required to improve the country’s existing legal frameworks and their enforcement mechanisms to address the prevailing threats of digital terrorism in the age of smartphone technology, where the YouTube-centric strict measure could effectively serve the purpose.