Written by Roshni Kapur, Diotima Chattoraj
On May 7, 2025, a student at Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi panicked upon seeing televised reports claiming a Pakistani strike on her hometown of Sopore in Indian-administered Kashmir. Across the border, footage on social media of a purported Indian Navy attack on Karachi port spread fear among residents of Karachi and Peshawar. While both these pieces of “news” turned out to be false, they reflected the wider wave of disinformation that flooded both mainstream and social media in India and Pakistan after India struck nine targets in mainland Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir in the aftermath of the Pahalgam attack, prompting retaliation from Islamabad and a four-day kinetic conflict.
Disinformation and sensationalism during a conflict can be dangerous because they add to the fog of war and constrain space for de-escalation and a diplomatic settlement. The extent of sensationalist media coverage was so significant that India’s Ministry of Home Affairs issued an advisory warning that dramatization of the conflict by Indian news television outlets could desensitize citizens and compromise emergency response. To mitigate these risks during future conflicts, both India and Pakistan should take multi-pronged measures to reform their domestic media industries, regulate the use of artificial intelligence (AI), and expand multilateral cooperation to improve access to factual information during crises.
Disinformation Amid Military Tensions
Between May 7 and 10, a four-day military confrontation erupted between India and Pakistan, marked by intense missile and drone attacks targeting each other’s military infrastructure. This escalation—more severe than the tensions that followed the Pulwama attack in 2019—brought the nuclear-armed neighbors to the brink of war. However, alongside the military clashes, there unfolded another equally alarming crisis: a flood of misinformation and propaganda across mainstream and digital media.
Alongside the military clashes, there unfolded another equally alarming crisis: a flood of misinformation and propaganda across mainstream and digital media.
Indian television news channels, including major national broadcasters, quickly became central actors in spreading mis and disinformation and were repeatedly debunked. For instance, reports claimed India had successfully struck a Pakistani nuclear base, downed two fighter jets, and damaged Karachi port. But visuals accompanying the reports were traced to unrelated conflicts, such as the war in Gaza, while some videos were AI-manipulated or featured reused footage from past events. As for the alleged attack on Karachi, the Indian navy clarified that although it had prepared for a strike, it never attacked the city. On the other hand, Pakistani state media claimed that Pakistan had destroyed India’s S-400 defense system while various mainstream Pakistani news channels and prominent journalists amplified claims of military victories.
Social media and AI further magnified the chaos. Deepfake videos showed Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif admitting defeat. Attempts to verify such content often stumbled due to the increasing realism of AI-generated media. Meanwhile, AI chatbots like Grok compounded the confusion by producing inaccurate or misleading responses.
What Enabled the Spread of Disinformation?
Several interconnected factors contributed to the proliferation of disinformation during the recent crisis. First, the suppression of dissent and independent reporting through censorship, content blocking, and arrests in both countries created an echo chamber that allowed partisan propaganda to emerge unchallenged. India blocked access to thousands of X accounts from Pakistan and Indian-administered Kashmir. In Pakistan too, YouTube channels operated from India were banned. Independent Indian news outlet The Wire also faced temporary blocking after publishing a story citing a Pakistani claim about the downing of an Indian jet. Fact-checkers—including Alt News, The Quint’s WebQoof, BOOM Live, and Deutsche Welle (DW) Fact Check—worked to counter false narratives using satellite imagery, media forensics, and public debunking efforts. However, this battle for the truth came at a cost: Alt News faced defamation lawsuits and harassment.
This limited access to independent or cross-border media prompted citizens to rely on heavily politicized and sensationalist domestic sources. In recent years, commercial pressures in the Indian media sector have diluted editorial rigor and incentivized journalists and reporters to adopt sensationalism and nationalistic theatrics in their coverage of crises and global events. Clampdown on the press in Pakistan has resulted in something similar.
Broader access to neutral coverage by international media outlets could have helped counterbalance this dynamic and provided alternative perspectives, and several of them did attempt to counter factually inaccurate claims via analysis of satellite imagery. However, balanced reporting by international media was trolled by hypernationalist segments in both countries and struggled to keep up with the rapidly evolving news cycle.
While the proliferation of fake news is not unique to South Asia and has also featured in other crises elsewhere, such as in the Russia-Ukraine war and the conflict in Gaza, the legacy of mistrust due to the almost 80-year India-Pakistan rivalry and the rapid escalation in recent crises makes this an especially destabilizing dynamic.
Countering Disinformation
The May 2025 India-Pakistan conflict underscored how quickly truth becomes a casualty in times of war. The combination of unchecked media practices, government censorship, nationalistic fervor, and rapidly advancing AI technologies created an environment where fiction masqueraded as fact. This aggressive and deliberate dissemination of falsehoods by mainstream and partisan media outlets risks entrenching information warfare as a default geopolitical tactic. This can in turn dangerously amplify future crises by inflaming public sentiment and pressuring leaders into adopting uncompromising positions, even when peaceful de-escalation may otherwise be possible.
From a strategic perspective, such practices threaten the integrity of backchannel diplomacy and crisis management by corrupting factual intelligence with politically expedient but falsified narratives. On the security front, disinformation could provoke premature or disproportionate military responses based on perceived rather than actual threats, thereby increasing the risk of accidental escalation between nuclear-armed states. Over time, the repeated use of internal propaganda could also degrade the credibility of military institutions and official communication channels, both domestically and internationally.
In such a volatile landscape, restoring public trust in the media and ensuring responsible journalism remain pressing issues. In particular, as disinformation becomes more sophisticated and common, India and Pakistan should adopt a multifaceted approach to media literacy. This includes incorporating critical media education into school and university curricula, promoting fact-checking initiatives in regional languages, and supporting community-based digital literacy campaigns. These efforts are essential in helping citizens critically assess information and resist the spread of misinformation and polarized narratives.
In such a volatile landscape, restoring public trust in the media and ensuring responsible journalism remain pressing issues.
At the same time, revitalizing the media landscape requires strengthening the broader ecosystem of public discourse. Non-governmental institutions—think-tanks, universities, and civil society organizations—can play a vital role in encouraging evidence-based debate and cross-partisan dialogue. Private sector actors can also be critical contributors—whether through corporate donations to independent press councils or support for public-interest journalism funds. These alternative funding streams can help insulate media from both state control and market pressures.
Although conventional tactics continue to be weapons of choice for disinformation, the rise of deep-fake videos and misleading content generated by chatbots has overwhelmed existing fact-checking capacities and further eroded public trust. To mitigate these harms, governments would have to establish bilateral or multilateral AI disinformation watchdogs to monitor and flag AI-generated content in real-time. As an example, former U.S. President Joe Biden had reached an agreement with seven tech firms—albeit voluntary—to introduce more safeguards pertaining to AI. Governments could also enforce platform accountability by requiring tech companies and social media platforms to promptly address harmful AI-generated disinformation. Digital literacy campaigns and easy access to verification tools will also help citizens in assessing the authenticity of what they see and hear. However, such regulatory measures must be carefully designed to prevent their misuse as instruments of censorship or political suppression. Regulations should be transparent, participatory, and grounded in democratic norms to avoid exacerbating the very issues they seek to resolve.
The recent conflict between India and Pakistan risks setting a troubling precedent in which disinformation is no longer a peripheral feature of war but a central strategic tool. This trend could make existing geopolitical tensions more volatile and explosive. In the pursuit of peace and security, governments, tech companies, and media organizations around the world would need to act with more alacrity to counter the rapid spread of disinformation.
