Disinformation spread to mainstream channels in what experts call deliberate ‘informational warfare’
As missiles and drones crisscrossed the night skies above India and Pakistan earlier this month, another invisible war was taking place.
Not long after the Indian government announced Operation Sindoor, the military offensive against Pakistan triggered by a militant attack in Kashmir that Delhi blamed on Islamabad, reports of major Pakistani defeats began to circulate online.
The Washington DC-based Centre for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH), which tracked and documented the misinformation coming from both sides, warned that the weaponisation of misinformation and disinformation in the the most recent India-Pakistan conflict was “not an isolated phenomenon, but part of a broader global trend in hybrid warfare”.
Raqib Hameed Naik, the executive director of CSOH, said there had been “a pretty catastrophic failure” on the part of social media platforms to moderate and control the scale of disinformation that was being generated from both India and Pakistan. Of the 427 most concerning posts CSOH examined on X, some of which had almost 10m views, only 73 had been flagged with a warning. X did not respond to request for comment.
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