Islamabad: "My time to lead will come,” said young Pakistani leader Bilawal Bhutto Zardari on his Facebook account. Nice quote for the headlines but a prank.
Facebook, the social networking website, has disabled two profiles in the name of Bilawal Bhutto and Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, who took over as the chief of Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) after his mother Benazir Bhutto’s assassination on December 27.
Brandee Barker, a spokesperson for Facebook, said the profiles were "not authentic and violated the website's terms of use".
Asif Ali Zardari, Bilawal’s father and co-chairperson of PPP, has admitted that his son has a Facebook profile but dismissed the quotes attributed to him on the website.
"I'm merely a student. I do things that students do, like make mistakes, eat junk food, watch Buffy (The Vampire Slayer) but most importantly of all learn,” said the last message Bilawal’s fake profile before it was deactivated.
According to a report in The New York Times, a prankster called Tonay had pretended to be Bilawal on Facebook.
"Since this is basically the first time the guy has come into the public eye, nobody has made an account for him, so I quickly registered one, and just been addin [sic] stuff to
the profile," Tonay said.
Bilawal's friend Phillippa Neal told Time magazine that the PPP leader has a real Facebook profile, under the alias "Bilawal Lawalib". That profile had certain comments like: "Well behaved women rarely make history".
During her lifetime, Bhutto guarded her children's privacy intensely. In the press conference after Bilawal's appointment as PPP chairperson, Zardari did not allow journalists to address questions to his son. "He is of a tender age," he told them.
The lack of information has seen journalists scouring the internet to enrich the scant portrait of the Bhutto successor and falling prey to the tricks of the pranksters who put up fake profiles of Bilawal on sites like Facebook.
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