Tens of thousands of times, social media posts erroneously state that the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI)’s official website, which lists its candidates for the 2024 parliamentary election, is unsafe because it is run out of India.
On January 24, a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, made the claim that the PTI’s website for the 2024 general election is being run out of Mumbai and Maharashtra. The caption stated, “PTI-RAW nexus exposed.”
The article also includes a 57-second video that purports to show that the online portal “pticandidates.com” is hosted and managed out of India.
To date, the post has been shared more than 700 times and seen about 300,000 times on X alone.
In a different post, a Facebook user said that anyone who register on the PTI website run the risk of their personal data being accessible by Indian operators.
Reality
The allegations making the rounds on the internet are untrue, and pticandidates.com, the website of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, is not run out of India, as independent digital media specialists have verified to Geo Fact Check.
In actuality, they add, a lot of websites in Pakistan and the surrounding area routinely route their data through servers in India.
Media Matters for Democracy (MMfD) of Islamabad conducted an investigation and discovered that “pticandidates.com” was hosted by US-based Amazon Web Services, which had servers spread across multiple nations. The server closest to Pakistan was situated in India, a neighboring country.
Huzaifa Baloch, a content analyst at MMfd, stated over the phone that “most Pakistani websites, including PTI’s website, are operated through these servers. This does not mean the data is unsafe or that India has access to it.”
