Three women, one name, and the label that wouldn't come off

In August of 2024, a face went viral on social media. Mahal Baloch’s photos—labelled ‘terrorist suicide bomber’—were viewed by thousands and shared by hundreds within minutes. The captions alleged she was the woman behind the suicide blast in Lasbela earlier that year.

They were wrong.

In plain accounting language, what unfolded online then is called the error of commission—when a transaction is posted to the wrong account because of similar names—an error accountants would call only “moderate” in severity. But for the Mahal in the photos, it was an error that upended her life, her children’s, and that of her family.

Mahal–The Mother was not the same person as Mahal–The Attacker, fact-checking outlet iVerify Pakistan found, with further substantiation from the deputy inspector general of police at Balochistan’s Counter Terrorism Department. It reported that the latter was a 23-year-old law student and member of the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), who went by the alias Zilan Kurd.

According to data gathered by iVerify Pakistan, roughly 1,026 potentially misleading and inaccurate claims were recorded on social media platforms across the country between December 2023 and November 2025, of which half were confirmed false. These numbers demonstrate how rapidly and dangerously unverified allegations pick up speed on digital and sometimes mainstream media, reaching millions before fact-checkers can catch up.

‘Collective punishment’

Eventually, the perpetrators move on, and the internet forgets. Mahal–The Mother and her family couldn’t do either.

“Falsely and deliberately linking her to a suicide bomber was not an ordinary accusation … it jeopardised her entire family’s safety,” said her lawyer Imran Baloch. The serious infringement of privacy took place with her identity and personal details disclosed publicly, contributing to “character assassination” in the media.

“Their life is no longer normal,” he said. Her children are unable to go to school, tuitions, or do anything normally, as the family is constantly fearful of being followed and monitored. Mahal’s household (herself, three minor daughters, and two elderly women) were living in an apartment in Quetta as “musafirs”. At one point, the landlord was pressured to evict them but he refused.

Imran argued that journalists and media organisations failed to meet basic verification standards before attributing the bombing to her, and that those who circulated the claim evaded accountability. And all this formed collective punishment and psychological trauma for six women who had nothing to do with it.

An information void

Pakistan faces a grave mis- and disinformation challenge that weak editorial oversight, poor media house ethics, and low media literacy all feed. “The problem is aggravated by media curbs, which make access to reliable and credible information more challenging,” said Syed Talal Ahsan, coordinator at iVerify Pakistan.

“This creates an unending cycle: something happens, information is scant, social media occupies the gap, unverified claims begin to circulate,” Ahsan said. “By the time the truth is uncovered, a distorted version of reality has already become a part of the social fabric.”

Balochistan also had to contend with an additional layer of censorship. Reliable information is already scarce coming out of the province making it difficult for journalists and fact-checkers to verify on-the-ground realities, particularly amid internet disruptions and connectivity restrictions.

Manzoor Ahmed, a reporter and president of the Balochistan Union of Journalists, called verification a daunting challenge for media professionals in the province. Misinformation spreads across WhatsApp, Facebook, X, and TikTok, he said, faster than journalists, fact-checkers, or authorities can confirm it. Journalists can’t even get confirmations from the authorities, who are reluctant to go on the record, leaving reporters to rely on their own independent sources.

‘You’re alive!’

Once a name and a label start moving online, they travel far beyond the conditions that produced them.

About 800km from Quetta, Mahal Baloch–The Artist, too, suffered the same fate. Her photos and videos were shared online, incorrectly portraying her as Mahal Baloch–The Attacker.

“I saw you on Facebook,” her professor said the morning after the Lasbela blast. She showed her a post that featured her, with the same terrorist tag.

“I was utterly shocked,” she recalled. It was incomprehensible to her. Up until she saw the posts herself, Mahal Baloch–The Artist had taken her teacher’s comments as a joke. That changed when she walked into the classroom, where she was greeted with: “Hey, you’re alive!”

Her clips circulating online had been ripped off a podcast she was featured in some time back. Clips of her were cut, edited, and posted online overnight as Mahal Baloch-The Attacker. “For over a month, I was being profiled and viewed through the lens of that one baseless accusation,” she said.

Who is accountable when algorithms amplify falsehoods?

“Platforms are not neutral pipes. They decide what gets seen, how fast, and by whom,” explained Nighat Dad, the founder of Digital Rights Foundation. When a platform builds a recommendation system that rewards outrage and then monetises that attention, it has, thus, taken on an editorial role, and it must accept the responsibility that comes with it. “Responsibility should be proportionate to amplification. Hosting a false post is one thing. Pushing it into hundreds of thousands of feeds is another,” she said.

Platforms operating in a country like Pakistan owe a duty of care like genuine risk assessment for conflict-affected regions, adequate moderation capacity in Urdu, Balochi, Sindhi, Pashto and Punjabi rather than English only. There should be transparency on what is amplified and why, with a real remedy for the person harmed.

She believed that labelling someone a suicide bomber in a place like Balochistan is not just reputational injury; it is a threat to that person’s life and their family’s safety, and it should be treated by platforms with the urgency of an imminent offline harm case, not routed through an ordinary queue.

In the Mahal case, the confusion arose partly from the shared name. That should tell platforms how thin their verification is when an accusation involves identity. “Naming a private individual as a terrorist should meet a far higher bar than any other kind of claim.”

Accountability begins long before the takedown request at the design stage, in the decision to build systems that reward this kind of content. “If a platform’s own recommendation system carried a falsehood to hundreds of thousands of people, then removing one post while the derivatives keep circulating is not accountability,” she argued.

The obligation continues through detection of copies, correction to the affected audience, and remedy for the person harmed, including an appeal route she can use without hiring a lawyer. On Pakistan’s legal response, Dad asserted: “A law that jails the retweeter while leaving the recommendation system untouched is not a misinformation law. It is a speech control law.”

What would actually help, in her view, is a genuinely independent regulator rather than one under executive control, along with obligations of transparency and risk assessment on platforms, with country- and language-specific reporting.

Also needed are enforceable timelines and due process for takedowns, with judicial oversight rather than executive discretion.

Mahal–The Mother’s children still haven’t gone back to school. Mahal–The Artist still finds her face attached to a stranger’s crime, in posts that never came down. While the mistaken identification of Mahal Baloch was ultimately debunked, the truth arrived only after the label had already done its damage.

Header image: The collage shows Mahal-The Artist (left), Mahal-The Bomber (centre) and Mahal-The Mother (right).