Pakistan power companies have not introduced additional peak charges
It includes a screenshot of a table titled "Regional Peak Hours by Distribution Company" listing peak hour periods in the morning and evening from different Pakistan power companies.
Image
Screenshot of the false X post taken on July 15, 2025 with a red X added by AFP
The same table was also shared elsewhere on Facebook and TikTok.
Soaring fuel costs globally, coupled with demands from the International Monetary Fund to slash government subsidies, led successive Pakistani administrations to repeatedly hike electricity costs (archived link).
Prices have fluctuated since 2022 but peaked at a 155-percent increase, and power bills sometimes outweigh rents.
However, the country's power companies have not introduced additional peak hour charges for the morning.
A reverse image search found the Ministry of Energy rejected the claim by reposting one such false post on X (archived link).
"There is no change in electricity peak hours. Claims about the inclusion of morning hours as peak hours are completely false and misleading. Peak hours remain the same as before," it reads.
"This is fake news and actionable disinformation."
Image
Screenshot of the Pakistan Ministry of Energy's response to the false claims on X, taken July 21, 2025
Most of Pakistan's power companies share the same evening peak hour charging schedule as the state-owned Power Information Technology Company, as shown in a timetable posted on its official website (archived link).
Image
A screenshot taken on July 18, 2025 of the official timetable of peak hour electricity tariff
Meanwhile, the privately owned Karachi Electric charges extra for power usage between 6:30 pm to 10:30 pm from April to October, and between 6 pm to 10 pm for the remaining five months of the year (archived link).
Neither company has announced an additional peak charge in the morning.
Pakistani outlet Geo News also debunked the false claim (archived link).
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
France 24
an hour ago
- France 24
TikTok launches crowd-sourced debunking tool in US
Footnotes, a feature that the popular video-sharing app began testing in April, allows vetted users to suggest written context for content that might be wrong or misleading -- similar to Community Notes on Meta and X. "Footnotes draws on the collective knowledge of the TikTok community by allowing people to add relevant information to content," Adam Presser, the platform's head of operations and trust and safety, said in a blog post. "Starting today, US users in the Footnotes pilot program can start to write and rate footnotes on short videos, and our US community will begin to see the ones rated as helpful -- and rate them, too," he added. TikTok said nearly 80,000 US-based users, who have maintained an account for at least six months, have qualified as Footnotes contributors. The video-sharing app has some 170 million US users. TikTok said the feature will augment the platform's existing integrity measures such as labeling content that cannot be verified and partnering with fact-checking organizations, such as AFP, to assess the accuracy of posts on the platform. The crowd-sourced verification system was popularized by Elon Musk's platform X, but researchers have repeatedly questioned its effectiveness in combating falsehoods. Earlier this month, a study found more than 90 percent of X's Community Notes are never published, highlighting major limits in efficacy. The Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas (DDIA) study analyzed the entire public dataset of 1.76 million notes published by X between January 2021 and March 2025. TikTok cautioned it may take some time for a footnote to become public, as contributors get started and become more familiar with the feature. "The more footnotes get written and rated on different topics, the smarter and more effective the system becomes," Presser said. Tech platforms increasingly view the community-driven model as an alternative to professional fact-checking. Earlier this year, Meta ended its third-party fact-checking program in the United States, with chief executive Mark Zuckerberg saying it had led to "too much censorship." The decision was widely seen as an attempt to appease President Donald Trump, whose conservative base has long complained that fact-checking on tech platforms serves to curtail free speech and censor right-wing content. Professional fact-checkers vehemently reject the claim. As an alternative, Zuckerberg said Meta's platforms, Facebook and Instagram, would use "Community Notes." Studies have shown Community Notes can work to dispel some falsehoods, like vaccine misinformation, but researchers have long cautioned that it works best for topics where there is broad consensus.
France 24
2 hours ago
- France 24
Canada central bank holds rate steady citing US tariff 'threats'
Canada remains uniquely vulnerable to Trump's trade war given the deep, broad ties between the neighboring economies. Trump's threat to hike tariffs to 35 percent on certain goods if no new trade deal is reached by Friday could wreak further havoc across a Canadian economy already strained by US protectionism. "Let's hope there's an agreement between Canada and the United States. Let's hope it's a good agreement," Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem told reporters after the rate announcement. He conceded, however, that "there is a sense that US policy may well remain unpredictable." "There's a sense going to be hard to restore that trust," in the United States as an economic partner, he added. A statement from the bank said that "while some elements of US trade policy have started to become more concrete in recent weeks, trade negotiations are fluid (and) threats of new sectoral tariffs continue." Tariffs unknown Canada was the first G7 country to begin cutting rates last year, following several hikes to tame pandemic-fuelled inflation. But Wednesday marked the bank's third consecutive pause, caution largely driven by Trump's policies. "It's hard to be as forward-looking as usual when you've got an unusual amount of uncertainty," Macklem said. A central bank forecast released Wednesday outlined a scenario where the impact of new US tariffs could be muted, if new levies do not apply to goods compliant with an existing trade deal Trump signed -- and praised -- during his first term. The bank said 100 percent of energy exports and 95 percent of all other exports -- excluding auto parts -- could be compliant with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). Drew Fagan, a tariff policy expert at Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs, told AFP that if exemptions for USMCA compliant goods hold, Canada does not necessarily need a deal urgently. He cited research showing the average tariff rate on Canadian goods entering the United States is currently two percent. That's "a big increase" compared to the 0.1 percent before Trump took office, but highlights that lots of Canadian goods are still crossing the border tariff free. If Trump decides to ditch the USMCA entirely, "then all bets are off," Fagan said. Carney cautious Targeted sector tariffs are expected to remain, bringing further pain for Canadian auto workers who have seen layoffs and shift cuts triggered by the president's push to have more cars made entirely in the United States. Canada's auto plants are highly integrated with US production sites, with parts crossing the border multiple times during assembly. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has in recent days tried to temper expectations, saying a tariff-free deal with Washington may not be possible. The prime minister, who previously led the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, has also said a recently agreed US-EU framework is not a template for Canada. "There are differences. One is geographic proximity," he said this week. The Bank of Canada did not rule out rate cuts later this year to help borrowers. "The Bank appears to be getting a little more comfortable with the notion that the Canadian economy will need the support from further interest rate cuts," CIBC economist Andrew Grantham said in statement, reacting to Wednesday's announcement. But Macklem stressed the bank would act if it sees tariffs driving inflation. © 2025 AFP
AFP
6 hours ago
- AFP
Posts mislead on Toyota's hydrogen-powered cars
'Toyota has just changed the game! A WATER ENGINE That Will DESTROY the EV industry! In a groundbreaking move that could redefine the global automotive industry, Toyota has unveiled an engine powered by water – running on hydrogen produced through electrolysis!' This is how a Facebook post from June 21, 2025, begins. The post further claims that the supposed engine would not use lithium, would not require charging stations, and would emit only water vapor. 'With this move, Toyota is not just competing with electric vehicles but is announcing the end of the battery era,' reads another post from July 11, 2025. Similar claims appear in many other Facebook posts – for example here, here and here – shared thousands of times on the platform. The claim spread previously on other social networks such as Telegram -- here and here, TikTok, YouTube, as well as in online articles such as this one. False and misleading claims like the Bulgarian one are circulating in many other languages, including English, and have been seen by millions of users worldwide across social media platforms. In a race for zero emissions cars that pits electric vehicles (EVs) against hydrogen ones, the claim that water instead of fuel can be used to power cars, has resurfaced sporadically over the past decades, but has never been supported by factual evidence. A handful of Bulgarian inventors are sometimes mentioned in relation to the supposed creation of a water‑fuelled engine, but there is no verified evidence that such a technology has ever existed. Such claims fuel and accusations that the automotive and oil industries deliberately conceal "revolutionary" technologies to preserve their profits, either by buying up and hiding patents or by allegedly making their inventors , as explained in this article on the Bulgarian fact-checking platform (archive). The claim, however, is false. Toyota told AFP that the company is not developing a 'water engine' and described the claim as 'fake news.' Experts also explained that such a system would be inefficient and very difficult to implement in real-world conditions. The Japanese car manufacturer produces vehicles that use hydrogen as fuel; the vehicles are at specialized stations and are equipped with lithium-ion batteries. The claim was also debunked by the Australian fact-checking platform AAP FactCheck. Image Screenshots of Facebook posts spreading false information. Taken on 28 July 2025. The red crisscrossing lines were added by AFP Toyota is not developing a 'water engine.' 'We are indeed not developing anything that could be described as a 'water engine,' said Jean-Yves Jault, from the Toyota Motor Corporation, in an email to AFP on July 23. Jault described the claims as 'fake news", mainly in dubious Facebook posts likely created to generate engagement by spreading false but sensational content, and referred to a Forbes article that debunks the claim. The author of that article is Robert Rapier, a chemical engineer, who explains that water is not a fuel but a product of hydrogen combustion, which is the actual source of energy. 'The idea that water can power a car is absurd,' he writes. The process of electrolysis Electrolysis i when water is split into hydrogen and oxygen. The process requires a significant amount of electricity and is efficient only when there is a stable power source. Electrolysis does not release energy – it consumes it in order to produce hydrogen, which can later be used as fuel to power vehicles. T Experts say that water is not used as fuel who works with his students on hydrogen fuel cell projects, that the hydrogen used as fuel is not produced on board the vehicle. 'All of these vehicles generate electricity in fuel cells that use pure hydrogen preloaded in tanks,' he stated in an email from July 7. 'I am not aware of any such vehicle, and even theoretically it would be extremely inefficient and impractical,' he added. 'It is technically possible to use electrolysis to utilize residual energy from a moving vehicle, but it is economically unjustified,' said Prof. Dr. Eng. Boriana Tsaneva from the Technical University of Sofia in an email to AFP on July 7, 2025. According to her, this is due not only to the high cost and additional weight of the electrolysis cell and its control electronics but also the generation of an explosive gas mixture that cannot be stored and must be fed into the fuel system immediately after being produced and the negligible amount of usable energy generated when the gas mixture is burned. Water as a cooling medium (and byproduct?) The Toyota Mirai is a mass-produced vehicle that uses a hydrogen fuel cell to generate electricity, which powers an electric motor (archives here and here). The vehicle is refueled at high-pressure specialized stations, and the only by-product of converting hydrogen into electricity is water vapor. The vehicle does not have an electrolysis system to produce hydrogen from water. It is also equipped with a lithium-ion battery. As part of its long-term vision for carbon-neutral mobility, Toyota is pursuing a multi-pathway strategy that includes hydrogen fuel cells, hydrogen combustion engines, and the development of solid-state batteries Toyota also uses electrolysis to produce hydrogen at some of its facilities, but this process takes place externally and not inside its vehicles. Battery electric vehicles currently dominate the zero-emission market due to lower costs, better energy efficiency, and more developed charging infrastructure. However, hydrogen cars are seen by some car manufacturers, including Toyota, as a complementary solution for heavy-duty transport and long-distance travel, though their widespread adoption faces challenges from high costs and limited refueling networks. Industry analysts widely expect that zero-emission transport will involve a mix of technologies – with batteries remaining the main option for most passenger cars, while hydrogen may play a niche role in sectors like heavy trucks and industrial transport (archive). AFP has previously debunked other claims alleging the existence of cars that run on water here and here.
