ហេតុអ្វីបានជាព័ត៌មានមិនពិតបានផ្ទុះឡើងក្នុងអំឡុងវិបត្តិឥណ្ឌា-ប៉ាគីស្ថាន

 Misleading content proliferated in part because of the kinetic nature of the conflict.

Disinformation Spirals in India and Pakistan

The most dangerous India-Pakistan confrontation in decades came to an end over the weekend after a cease-fire went into effect. The crisis yielded numerous unsettling takeaways, chief among them being the willingness of both nuclear states to deploy significant force. Each side launched missiles and drones deep into the other’s territory to target military sites.

What also stands out is the dangerous escalation in use of another weapon: disinformation. An overload of misleading information or propaganda during conflict inflames emotions and increases miscalculation risks. It also heightens the possibility of a boy-who-cried-wolf effect: Confronted with frequent lies, people are more likely to be skeptical about accurate news.

Disinformation proliferated throughout the latest India-Pakistan crisis. Fact-checkers compiled social media threads showing how photos and videos purporting to depict the confrontation were actually images from other locations—and, in many cases, video games.

One of the most viral misleading posts, viewed nearly 1.5 million times on X, sought to pass off Iranian missile strikes on an Israeli air base last year as Indian missile strikes against Pakistan. Others made false claims, such as assertions that a female Indian pilot was shot down in Pakistan and boasts that Pakistani cyberattacks damaged 70 percent of India’s electricity grid.

Perhaps the most stunning examples of disinformation came late on Friday local time, when several Indian media outlets posted wildly inaccurate claims alleging that an insurgent group had seized the Pakistani city of Quetta; that the port of Karachi, Pakistan’s financial capital, was destroyed; and that Pakistani Army chief Asim Munir was arrested.

The World Economic Forum recently ranked India as the country most at risk for misinformation and disinformation. But false reports surged in Pakistan during the crisis as well. Examples ranged from reports of internal dissension within the Indian military to boasts of Pakistani hackers breaching Indian military networks. The Pakistani government’s official X account even used a clip from a video game to depict its military actions against India.

Of course, the use of disinformation during military crises, including between India and Pakistan, is not new. But the emergence of social media as a powerful multiplier has made propaganda and misinformation campaigns more potent—especially in these two countries, where internet penetration and social media usage rates have surged in recent years.

But two factors help explain the recent flood of false content. One is the crisis itself: It featured intense amounts of kinetic action—the most since a brief India-Pakistan conflict in 1999—and it played out over several days. There was plenty of fodder to misrepresent. And such a serious crisis meant that emotions were high and the desire for real-time information was strong, creating incentive for more content.

Further, the emergence of artificial intelligence technology loomed large. AI-generated disinformation—including deepfake videos depicting a Pakistani military officer acknowledging the loss of jets and U.S. President Donald Trump vowing to “erase Pakistan”—supplemented other false reports. The popularity of AI produced an online spectacle: Many social media users asked Grok, X’s AI tool, to indicate if unverified claims were true.

For India and Pakistan, the stability implications of shifts in their uses of technology—from deploying drones on the battlefield to weaponizing AI—are especially concerning. They raise the risk that the next crisis will be even more escalatory than this one, which was arguably the most serious India-Pakistan standoff since both formally became nuclear states in 1998.

Foreign policy