Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s caretaker government has decided to end a project started by PTI’s provincial government that hired social media influencers to hire the government’s image.

A statement by the government said that 1,109 influencers had been hired by the government in the information department. The ministry has now written to the finance ministry that the stipends and salaries of these influencers should no longer be paid.

The government said that the project has already stopped operating in practice and was a ‘waste of resource’.

The influencers had been hired in June 2022 to ‘counter fake news’ against the then-PTI government in the province. A stipend of Rs25,00 had been fixed for each influencer. A total of amount of over Rs700 million had been set aside for the project.