ISLAMABAD: The foreign office on Friday accused the Indian state of encouraging “disinformation” by its media to create a pretext for further aggression toward Pakistan and “exploit misinformation for political and military ends.”
As hostilities rose this week between India and Pakistan and they engaged in the worst fighting in decades, a wave of online disinformation on both sides is risking further inflaming passions and escalating the conflict in an electronic fog of war.
On May 6, multiple Indian news channels uploaded a widely shared video from Gaza showing a series of massive explosions and people running helter-skelter, with captions claiming it was footage of Indian air strikes against Pakistani targets.
Even India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party shared a collage of nine videos on May 7, claiming they were of India’s strikes on Pakistan. Boom, an Indian fact-checking organization, found that the first clip was from Iran’s October 2024 strikes on Israel and the third was from Israel’s air strikes on Gaza from October 2023.
Indian media outlets have over the past 24 hours claimed that Delhi has damaged or destroyed Pakistan’s main port in Karachi, captured the Pakistani capital of Islamabad and militants had taken over the southwestern city of Quetta. India media has also said Pakistan attacked multiple locations in parts of Indian-administered Kashmir and mainland India, reports Islamabad has rejected as “reckless.”
“The conduct of Indian media last night [Thursday] was extremely irresponsible and jingoistic, and frankly, disinformation is one thing, but the conduct of Indian media yesterday was indeed farcical, encouraged by the Indian state,” the foreign office spokesman said in a weekly press briefing.
“Repeated pattern of leveling accusations against Pakistan without any credible investigation reflects a deliberate strategy to manufacture a pretext for aggression and to further destabilize the region. Such actions not only further endanger regional peace but also reveal a disturbing willingness to exploit misinformation for political and military ends.”
There has been misinformation on the Pakistani side too. After India said it had struck ‘terror camps’ at nine sites inside Pakistan, a years-old video resurfaced on social media that falsely claimed it depicted explosions at an Indian ammunition depot targeted by Pakistani forces. The footage has in fact appeared in news reports about a fire near an army garrison in the Pakistani city of Sialkot in March 2022.
Social media users also shared an old clip falsely claiming it showed wreckage of an Indian warplane shot down by Pakistani troops. The video showed a fighter jet that crashed in western India after its pilots reported a technical snag.
A division of the Pakistani Economy Ministry denied Friday that it had appealed to its international partners “for more loans after heavy losses inflected by enemy” in a now-deleted post on X. Officials said the account had been hacked.
Meanwhile, New Delhi ordered X to block over 8,000 accounts in India, subject to potential penalties including significant fines and imprisonment of the company’s local employees.
“The orders include demands to block access in India to accounts belonging to international news organizations and prominent X users,” X’s Global Government Affairs team said on its account, adding it was unable to publish the executive orders at this time due to “legal restrictions.”
“The Indian government has not specified which posts from an account have violated India’s local laws. For a significant number of accounts, we did not receive any evidence or justification to block the accounts.”
The platform said it disagreed with the Indian government’s demands, describing the blockade of accounts as “contrary to the fundamental right of free speech.”
“X is exploring all possible legal avenues available to the company,” it said. “We encourage all users who are impacted by these blocking orders to seek appropriate relief from the courts.”
– With inputs from AFP and Reuters
