Claim: Imran Khan was voted Best Prime Minister by 93% of Pakistanis in a survey conducted by Arab Magazine
Fact: Arab Magazine did not conduct a survey where Imran Khan was polled Best Prime Minister by 93% of Pakistanis.
On 15 August 2022, a Twitter user shared an image which claimed that 93% Pakistanis believe Imran Khan to be the Best PM, according to Arab Magazine. The same claim has been made earlier in the past on 6 August 2022, 16 July 2022, and 30 April 2022 as well, when multiple users shared this image on Twitter.
Due to the virality and frequency of this claim appearing on social media, we decided to investigate its authenticity.
Fact or Fiction?
This claim seems to originate from a tweet posted on 29 September 2020 by the official Twitter handle of the Khaleej Times. The tweet reads, “93% voted in favor of Prime Minister Imran Khan as a Better PM in Last 15 Years; Poll Reveals,” and the image attached says, “Who was/is the better Prime Minister of Pakistan in the last 15 years?”
The tweet also linked to a Khaleej Mag news article where they explained that the publication conducted a poll on Twitter on 26 September 2020 which asked users, “Who was/is the better Prime Minister of Pakistan in the last 15 years?” The poll only allowed users to choose from the following 4 options:
Option 1 – Y.R. Gilani/ R.P. Ashraf
Option 2 – Nawaz Sharif/ Khaqan Abbasi
Option 3 – Shaukat Aziz
Option 4 – Current PM Imran Khan
According to the official website of the National Assembly, in the last 15 years to this tweet between 2005 and 2020, Pakistan has had nine different Prime Ministers. Apart from the four options in this poll, there have been three caretaker Prime Ministers, Muhammad Mian Soomro, Hazar Khan Khoso, and Justice (R) Nasir-ul-Mulk. Moreover, this poll is constrained to last 15 years which automatically excludes some popular leaders such as Benazir Bhutto and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, for example.
This poll gathered 16,041 votes from Twitter accounts, which may not necessarily be all individual and unique. Out of these 16,041 Twitter votes, Imran Khan received 14,950. In 2020 there were 37 million social media users in Pakistan, according to Data Reportal’s Digital 2020 Pakistan report. However, this statistic does not consider that some users create multiple accounts.
According to another Data Reportal report, even as recent as early 2022, a maximum of 3.4 million social media user accounts exist on Twitter in Pakistan; this makes up only around 1.5% of the total population.
Therefore, because this survey’s respondents are not a representative sample of the country’s population, it is false to say that 93% of Pakistanis believe Imran Khan to be the Best Prime Minister in the country’s history.
Virality
Soch Fact Check conducted a CrowdTangle analysis for the 691-day period since 26 September 2020 to 18 August 2022 using the following search terms:
- “imran khan” “survey” “93”
- “Arab magazine” “imran khan”
- “عمران خان” “93” “عرب”
We found several Facebook posts and tweets discussing this survey in various different months in this almost 2-year time period gathering thousands of interactions and millions of views on some posts.
From 2020, we found several posts on Facebook with a total of 35,646 interactions and 2,228 shares. Some of these can be seen here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
From 2022, we found Facebook posts with 9350 interactions and 1153 shares. Examples can be seen here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
On Twitter, we found tweets reaching more than 3,834,159 followers and gathering more than 20,969 interactions over this time period. Some examples can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
Conclusion: A viral image claims that Imran Khan has been voted Best Prime Minister by 93% of Pakistanis in a survey conducted by Arab Magazine. However, Soch Fact Check confirmed that this statement is false as the survey was conducted on Twitter and not amongst a representative sample of Pakistani citizens.