None of it was true. All of it went viral.
As India and Pakistan teetered on the edge of open warfare this May following a gruesome terror attack in Pahalgam that killed 26 civilians, a parallel battle unfolded, not on land or in air, but in the boundless terrain of cyberspace.
This was not merely a war of missiles and drones; it was an orchestrated campaign of perception warfare, fuelled by a deluge of misinformation and psychological operations designed to distort, distract and destabilise.
This is how ‘Operation Social Media’ unfolded — an invisible front that exposed how deeply disinformation can influence modern conflict, and how India, despite facing a sophisticated hybrid threat, sought to maintain both operational focus and digital hygiene.
According to the Washington-based non-profit think tank, the Centre for the Study of Organized Hate, “X emerged as the primary hub for both misinformation and disinformation.” The think tank analysed 437 such posts and found that 179, or nearly 41%, originated from verified accounts, which are often perceived as credible due to their blue-check status. These included posts by politicians, influencers, media personalities, and retired military officials.
“What was particularly alarming,” the report noted, “was the credibility lent to these falsehoods by high-profile sources.” Despite the scale of this disinformation, only 73 posts, just 17%, were flagged by X’s Community Notes, the platform’s crowd-sourced fact-checking feature. This, the think tank argued, pointed to a serious lapse in content moderation at a time of high geopolitical tension.
Raqib Hameed Naik, director of the think tank, described the information war as “a global trend in hybrid warfare”. “This wasn’t ordinary nationalist chest-thumping,” said Joyojeet Pal of the University of Michigan. “This had the potential to push two nuclear-armed neighbours to the brink.”