Same election. Same war. Same border. As many realities as there are channels willing to sell you one.
I watched America’s election night from a couch in Karachi with four tabs open, and by 2 am none of them agreed on what had just happened.
The first tab belonged to the coalition that had just put him back in office: the factory town, the border town, the diner at 6 am — the people the coastal networks had stopped bothering to see. It carried the promise from his first term, the wall that was never quite finished. This year it came back as vans outside apartment buildings and worksites, and agents in masks. More than 170 U.S. citizens were swept up and held anyway, according to the reporters keeping the running count.
The second tab belonged to the department doing the sweeping. It said none of that happened. It called the count itself a lie and labelled citizens filming their own arrests as unreliable narrators of those arrests.
The third tab belonged to nobody’s citizens but everybody’s algorithm. It happened to be owned by a man who had also taken a desk inside the new administration. That same season, he was deciding which of the first two tabs a given user would even be shown.
The fourth tab sat over Moscow and Beijing. State broadcasters ran their usual chorus: Look at them, the so-called beacon, tearing itself apart on schedule, right on time.
Same raids. Same footage. Four separate funerals and one party, depending entirely on which studio you trusted to narrate your own country back to you.
Nobody needed to rig anything. They just needed you to keep watching their channel and never open the other one.
Corporate Media and Censorship
Fox, for its part, never had to change the channel. It ran the administration’s own rebuttal of the ICE citizen-detention reporting almost verbatim — a press release dressed up as parity. Matter settled.
The same season took out two entertainers for opposite reasons and taught one lesson. Stephen Colbert called his own network’s parent-company settlement with the president a bribe with better paperwork. He said it live, on air. Three days later, CBS cancelled his show. They called it purely financial, timing be damned.
Jimmy Kimmel joked about the online reaction to a political assassination. Within two days, Disney pulled him off the air “indefinitely.” An FCC chairman made noise about broadcast licences in the background. Then Disney+ cancellations started showing up on a spreadsheet a boardroom actually reads. The show was back within the week — unapologetic, ratings intact.
One entertainer, punished for speaking; one entertainer, reinstated by quarterly projection. Big Brother, it turns out, doesn’t need a ministry when an earnings call will do the same job, just more quietly.
Information Firewalls and State Narratives
China didn’t even get to have the argument. There was no split feed to choose from. The platforms carrying any of it — the panic, the memes, the fact-checkers arguing with each other in real time — don’t exist inside the firewall. No X, no Instagram, no Facebook. The election arrived pre-chewed, through state media only, as a cautionary tale about a system too chaotic to envy. A billion people got the moral of the story without the story itself. That isn’t a flaw in the wall — that’s the wall working exactly as designed.
Then there is the peninsula that never needed a firewall because there was nothing to firewall against. The North’s telescreen was never a metaphor. Eighty kilometres south, its neighbour runs one of the noisiest, most self-critical democracies on the planet. Orwell split a country with a wall in the mind; Korea split it with an actual one. Both halves, seventy years on, still insist the other is the fiction.
Algorithmic Bubbles and Local Realities
I would like to say Pakistan doesn’t play this game, but we keep our own Ministry of Love too — filed under tidier names with better paperwork. Most of us learned early which sentences are safer left unfinished. The line between an opinion and a case file moves depending on who’s asking, and nobody here needs that explained twice.
“Godi media” across the border gave the whole region a masterclass last May. Prime-time sirens declared Karachi Port destroyed, Lahore under attack, Islamabad captured, and the Pakistani prime minister surrendered — all fabricated, and all later confirmed false by India’s own fact-checkers. One viral claim was so untethered from geography that it had a warship “reaching” Lahore — a city with no coastline to reach.
Pakistan called its own side of the story Marka-e-Haq (the Battle of Truth) and declared it victorious on every channel that mattered here. That’s a bubble too. I was inside it, cheering along with everyone else’s uncle.
Orwell called it doublethink — holding two contradictory facts and believing both, sincerely, at once. He assumed it would require training. It just needed a “For You” page and a flag to wave while you watched.
Three tabs are still open on my phone. None of them agree.
I’ve stopped expecting them to. I’ve started asking, instead, which one was built for me — and by whom.
Same election. Same war. Same border. As many realities as there are channels willing to sell you one.
I watched America’s election night from a couch in Karachi with four tabs open, and by 2 am none of them agreed on what had just happened.
The first tab belonged to the coalition that had just put him back in office: the factory town, the border town, the diner at 6 am — the people the coastal networks had stopped bothering to see. It carried the promise from his first term, the wall that was never quite finished. This year it came back as vans outside apartment buildings and worksites, and agents in masks. More than 170 U.S. citizens were swept up and held anyway, according to the reporters keeping the running count.
The second tab belonged to the department doing the sweeping. It said none of that happened. It called the count itself a lie and labelled citizens filming their own arrests as unreliable narrators of those arrests.
The third tab belonged to nobody’s citizens but everybody’s algorithm. It happened to be owned by a man who had also taken a desk inside the new administration. That same season, he was deciding which of the first two tabs a given user would even be shown.
The fourth tab sat over Moscow and Beijing. State broadcasters ran their usual chorus: Look at them, the so-called beacon, tearing itself apart on schedule, right on time.
Same raids. Same footage. Four separate funerals and one party, depending entirely on which studio you trusted to narrate your own country back to you.
Nobody needed to rig anything. They just needed you to keep watching their channel and never open the other one.
Corporate Media and Censorship
Fox, for its part, never had to change the channel. It ran the administration’s own rebuttal of the ICE citizen-detention reporting almost verbatim — a press release dressed up as parity. Matter settled.
The same season took out two entertainers for opposite reasons and taught one lesson. Stephen Colbert called his own network’s parent-company settlement with the president a bribe with better paperwork. He said it live, on air. Three days later, CBS cancelled his show. They called it purely financial, timing be damned.
Jimmy Kimmel joked about the online reaction to a political assassination. Within two days, Disney pulled him off the air “indefinitely.” An FCC chairman made noise about broadcast licences in the background. Then Disney+ cancellations started showing up on a spreadsheet a boardroom actually reads. The show was back within the week — unapologetic, ratings intact.
One entertainer, punished for speaking; one entertainer, reinstated by quarterly projection. Big Brother, it turns out, doesn’t need a ministry when an earnings call will do the same job, just more quietly.
Information Firewalls and State Narratives
China didn’t even get to have the argument. There was no split feed to choose from. The platforms carrying any of it — the panic, the memes, the fact-checkers arguing with each other in real time — don’t exist inside the firewall. No X, no Instagram, no Facebook. The election arrived pre-chewed, through state media only, as a cautionary tale about a system too chaotic to envy. A billion people got the moral of the story without the story itself. That isn’t a flaw in the wall — that’s the wall working exactly as designed.
Then there is the peninsula that never needed a firewall because there was nothing to firewall against. The North’s telescreen was never a metaphor. Eighty kilometres south, its neighbour runs one of the noisiest, most self-critical democracies on the planet. Orwell split a country with a wall in the mind; Korea split it with an actual one. Both halves, seventy years on, still insist the other is the fiction.
Algorithmic Bubbles and Local Realities
I would like to say Pakistan doesn’t play this game, but we keep our own Ministry of Love too — filed under tidier names with better paperwork. Most of us learned early which sentences are safer left unfinished. The line between an opinion and a case file moves depending on who’s asking, and nobody here needs that explained twice.
“Godi media” across the border gave the whole region a masterclass last May. Prime-time sirens declared Karachi Port destroyed, Lahore under attack, Islamabad captured, and the Pakistani prime minister surrendered — all fabricated, and all later confirmed false by India’s own fact-checkers. One viral claim was so untethered from geography that it had a warship “reaching” Lahore — a city with no coastline to reach.
Pakistan called its own side of the story Marka-e-Haq (the Battle of Truth) and declared it victorious on every channel that mattered here. That’s a bubble too. I was inside it, cheering along with everyone else’s uncle.
Orwell called it doublethink — holding two contradictory facts and believing both, sincerely, at once. He assumed it would require training. It just needed a “For You” page and a flag to wave while you watched.
Three tabs are still open on my phone. None of them agree.
I’ve stopped expecting them to. I’ve started asking, instead, which one was built for me — and by whom.