he girl never existed so that the assault never happened. However, thousands of students marched to express solidarity with her and clashed with police.

In Pakistan’s new reality ‘truth’ is whatever trends on the social media. Our youth wage wars with hashtags and shares. The protest demonstrations over a fabricated campus assault story weren’t just about a false account, they also mirrored our broken relationship with objective fact.

I’ve spent several years studying and teaching human behaviour, but nothing had prepared me for what I witnessed in the frequently violent Lahore protests. “We know this case might be a fake,” an undergrad told me, her voice sharp, “but do not many cases go unreported? That’s why we were there.”

It is this raw anger and deep-seated distrust that our lawmakers seem not to take into account while drafting yet another law against fake news. They may be missing the forest for the trees.

The truth is we are losing our children to cyberspace. Every morning, millions of young Pakistanis wake up and dive straight into a cesspool of manipulation. Social media conspiracy narrative about political rivals get more views than election rules and manifestos. WhatsApp forwards about alleged conspiracies spread faster than he Covid-19 did.

“These children think they’re immune to propaganda,” says Dr Zaman, a sociologist specialising in youth behavior at Quaid-i-Azam University. “They laugh at their parents, whom they see falling for fake WhatsApp forwards, then share unverified tweets because it feels right to them.” He shows me a viral post about national economy. It is a fabricated story but has been shared 50,000 times. “They now trust random anonymous accounts more than conventional credible sources of information.”

The authorities’ response to the problem has oscillated between panic and paralysis. The latest announcement of a “crackdown on rumor-mongers” may be just another in a series of reactive measures that tackle only some of the symptoms while the disease spreads. One can’t fight digital wildfires with paperwork and press releases. A junior officer at the FIA’s cybercrime wing (speaking off the record) put it bluntly: “We’re fighting a fifth-generation war with first-generation thinking. By the time we trace one fake news source, fifty more have popped up.”

The term “fifth-generation warfare” gets thrown around a lot in Pakistan these days, often by people needing a scapegoat. What is happening on our social media isn’t warfare – it’s far worse. It’s a degenerative loss of the ability to separate fact from fiction.

Visit any university campus today. The ethnic, religious and ideological divisions aren’t just visible – they’re carved in digital stone. Students live in algorithm-driven bubbles so thick, two people can witness the same event and walk away with completely opposite versions of reality. The fake rape case was a perfect illustration of this. Even after police said they had found no evidence to support it, hashtags and shares demanding justice kept trending. The truth had become irrelevant to the narrative.

“It’s like we’re living in parallel universes,” says a student activist who also has a blog. “My newsfeed on Facebook shows me one Pakistan, my classmate’s shows him another. We’re not even arguing about the same facts any longer.”

Therein lies the real crisis. It’s not just about fake news – it’s about the absence of a shared perception of reality. When a society can’t even agree on basic facts, progress becomes impossible and justice a pipe dream.

The solution does not lie in another law or crackdown. It’s not even in better fact-checking (though we definitely need that). The solution lies in rebuilding trust – between generations, between institutions and citizens and between the state and the youth.

But trust is earned, not legislated. While the speaker of the provincial assembly announces plans for new laws and federal agencies prepare for crackdowns, it is easy to miss the point. The youth are sharing fake news because they’ve lost faith in official narratives. These protests should be a wake-up call. Young Pakistanis are screaming to be heard and taken seriously.

We will keep fighting shadows until we understand and address this rot in our information ecosystem.

The writer is an Associate Professor at the School of Sociology,Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.