The government that talks to itself

In marketing, when the source is not trusted, the message stops mattering. Doesn’t matter how good your copy is. Doesn’t matter how well the video’s shot. Nobody’s listening once they’ve decided they don’t trust who’s talking. A lot of Pakistan is living in exactly that condition with its own government right now. I’ll leave the question of whether that’s fair for someone else to write about. What I want to get into is something sitting underneath all of it, something that would still need fixing even if the entire country decided tomorrow to trust the government completely. A social media regulator not having a social media presence isn’t a small gap, it’s almost a contradiction in the name. Every organisation has a head, a chairman, a managing director, a minister, and there’s nothing wrong with showing that person doing the job. The problem starts when the person becomes the content strategy: their meetings, visits, handshakes, and signed documents replacing the information the audience actually came for. Open enough Pakistani government accounts and this becomes obvious fast. They aren’t talking to the public. They’re talking about themselves, in front of the public, and mistaking that for communication. A few days ago, I went looking for basic information about the Social Media Protection and Regulatory Authority, the body Pakistan recently set up to regulate social media. I searched Google first and found no website. My first thought was fair enough, it’s only been a few months since the launch, maybe the site’s there but Google hasn’t indexed it properly yet. So I went straight to the platforms myself, checked X, checked Facebook. Nothing official on either. At that point I genuinely started doubting my own search skills, because a social media regulator not having a social media presence isn’t a small gap, it’s almost a contradiction in the name. If it exists under some other handle I haven’t found, I’d honestly like to know, because right now it’s easier to find fan pages for cricketers who retired a decade ago than it is to find this authority. That one’s an easy target because the irony writes itself. The less obvious version of the same problem shows up somewhere that actually tried harder. Uraan Pakistan, the government’s five-pillar economic plan, launched at the end of 2024 with the full treatment, ministerial statements, media coverage, a proper launch site. Go check that website today and it has the specific stillness of a page nobody’s opened the back end of in a long while. Their LinkedIn hasn’t posted in close to a year. The Facebook page is active, to be fair, regularly even, but look at what’s actually going up there and it’s almost entirely reshared content: the ministry’s posts, the minister’s meetings, his statements, and his clips. The page is alive. It’s just stopped being about Uraan Pakistan somewhere along the way, and started being about him instead. I’m not going to sit here and name every account doing this, mostly because I can’t, there are simply too many, and singling out a handful risks making this sound like it’s about a few unlucky departments rather than what it actually is, which is close to the default setting. Open almost any official account at random and you’ll land on the same content diet. Meetings, MOUs, and delegation visits. Sentences written by someone who clearly understood the subject deeply and who, somewhere in the writing, forgot that most people reading it wouldn’t understand. The Special Investment Facilitation Council (SIFC) deserves its own mention because the failure there is a slightly different shape. From what I understand, their actual job is facilitation, connecting the right departments, clearing the right approvals, not directly bringing investment in themselves. And yet years into their existence, the same question keeps circling on Pakistani social media and among vloggers, critics, and supporters of the government alike, how much investment has SIFC actually brought in. Maybe I’ve got their mandate wrong. Or maybe their communication simply never got around to explaining the one word sitting in their own name, facilitation, clearly enough for it to stick. Either way, when the most common question people ask about an organisation is the wrong question, that’s rarely the public’s failure to understand. It’s usually the organisation’s failure to explain. The same institution-first mindset reaches the people furthest from the cities too. A communications strategy built around a website and the occasional press release quietly assumes reliable connectivity, English literacy, a smartphone, time, confidence, and the patience to navigate a portal written like a legal notice. Pakistan has more internet access than the old “rural people are offline” stereotype suggests, but access is not the same thing as usable access. A person can technically be online and still be excluded by language, format, cost, device quality or the absence of anyone nearby who can explain the process. It leaves out a lot of young people too, the ones who never fully trusted a press release to begin with, and who get their information from group chats and short videos and creators they actually follow, not from a ministry account posting a photo of a signing ceremony. Nobody set out to exclude either group. Nobody had to. Building only for whoever’s easiest to reach does the excluding quietly, on its own, without anyone deciding to. None of this had to be the outcome, and that’s really the reason I’m writing this at all. The National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) moved much of the identity-card journey onto a phone app, including mobile biometric verification, so many applicants could complete the process without starting at a branch. Millions of people have downloaded it and used it because somebody had thought about the person holding the phone rather than only the database sitting behind it. Years before that, during COVID-19, the government did something almost embarrassingly simple that outperformed most digital campaigns that have come since. They put a health advisory on the call-waiting tone, so before your call even connected, you’d already heard it. No app to download. No website to go looking for. The message simply lived inside something people were already doing, dozens of times a day, without anyone needing to ask them to change their behavior first. I don’t think a sharper Instagram grid or slow motion TikTok style videos fixes a trust problem as deep as the one Pakistan has with its own government right now. It won’t and I am not pretending otherwise. But there’s a smaller, and much more manageable problem sitting just underneath that bigger one, and this one actually has a fix. Every institution I’ve mentioned here knows exactly how to talk about itself. Almost none of them have worked out how to talk to somebody else. That gap isn’t about politics, and honestly it isn’t really about money either, most of these bodies clearly have enough budget for a website and a launch event with cameras in the room. It’s a smaller, more boring decision than either of those, one that mostly just hasn’t been made yet, to write the next post for whoever’s going to read it, not for whoever’s going to approve it. The article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Business Recorder or its owners.

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