PTI’s Digital Campaigning in the 2024 Pakistani Election

The third speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Zaneera Malik, whose focus is on the use of social media as a strategic political communication tool in the fragile democracy of Pakistan. The focus here is especially on the PTI party, led by former cricket star Imran Khan, which lost the February 2024 election.

PTI won the 2018 elections and Khan became Prime Minister, but he lost office in 2022, and has been mired in political and legal controversy every since. Worse yet, PTI lost its election symbol, the cricket bat: because of limited literacy rates in Pakistan, each party has an easily recognisable symbol, but this was taken from PTI and each PTI candidate was forced to run as an individual independent candidate with their own personal election symbol.

This too, and especially PTI candidates’ campaigning on social media can be understood from the perspective of affordances, and the present study explored the use of social media affordances by candidates. PTI began to host virtual rallies and online interactive sessions across various platforms; these were also supplemented with AI, replicating Imran Khan’s voice and image through AI, based on notes written by him while he was in prison.

The party also used social media to share their candidates’ names via social media, and created online chat systems that would let voters know about local candidates based on their electorate. This was an effective strategy in a difficult electoral context, and PTI is well ahead of it’s political rivals in the use of these technologies.