ISLAMABAD: As Pakistan and India faced off this week in the steepest escalation in tensions between the two nuclear-armed neighbors in decades, social media users on both sides fanned the flames of war by unleashing a spurt of fake news and hostile messages.
On Tuesday, Pakistan said Indian jets had violated the Line of Control (LoC) which splits the disputed Kashmir valley into two parts, one administered by Pakistan, the other by India. India said it hit a militant training camp inside Pakistan on Tuesday morning but Pakistan said Indian jets were barely in its airspace for a few minutes before being chased away by Pakistani warplanes without any damage to lives or infrastructure.
The next day, Pakistan said it had carried out airstrikes on six targets across its border with India, shot down two Indian warplanes and arrested an enemy pilot, raising the possibility of further escalation.
But as the two countries engaged in dogfights in the air, netizens on both sides took to Twitter and Facebook to defend their nations and in the process unleash unverified news and dubious pictures and video clips.
Indian users posted pictures from the 2005 earthquake, describing the bloodied bodies and damage to buildings as having been caused by Indian airstrikes. A video viewed hundreds of thousands of times on Facebook claiming to show an Indian Air Force pilot captured after Pakistan shot down an Indian jet on February 27 was actually footage of a pilot injured in an accident at an air show rehearsal in India’s Bangalore.
On the Pakistani side, a large number of tweets asked for vengeance against India following reports they had violated Pakistani airspace on Tuesday morning. ‘Pakistan Army Zindabad,’ ‘PakistanAirForceOurPride’ and ‘PakistanStikesBack’ become top trends.
On the Indian side, social media users celebrated that India had avenged a February 14 car bomb attack in Indian-administered Kashmir in which at least 40 Indian troopers were killed. Here’s a collage of tweets that sparked anger and heightened tensions:
#HowsTheKhaufPakistan has been trending on Indian Twitter and been used in response to many of our governments tweets including one confirming that the release of Indian films in our cinemas would be banned effective immediately.
One Twitter user quoted a film, ‘We will kill you.’
Additionally, graphic language and photoshopped images came at the responses in droves.
The calls to war escalated over the hours with Bollywood celebrities like Ranveer Singh, Priyanka Chopra and Madhuri Dixit saluting their air force with a hashtag that started growing #JaiHind.
