Delhi: On 9 May 2025, an X (formerly Twitter) account with over 400,000 followers said that in “information warfare, perception is the battlefield” and news that “damages Pakistan” should be amplified even if it is false. Conversely, news that hurts India should be buried even if true. 

“This is not journalism. This is war. Psychological warfare matters,” said the post. “Every post is a bullet.”

Another account with close to 300,000 followers listed a series of untruths like “a coup in Pakistan” and “Karachi/Lahore” being attacked by the Indian army, calling it “positive auxiliary assistance” and those who had shared them were the “electronic warfare arm of the motherland”. 

“Anyone who labels you ‘fake news’ or ‘misinformation’ is a paid Pakistani 5th column,” said the post.

These posts referred to the military clash between India and Pakistan, which began on 7 May when India targeted terrorist locations within Pakistan, two weeks after terrorists killed 26 tourists in Kashmir. 

Since the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 2014, false and misleading information has become an important tool for right-wing groups in India to promote their agenda of religious division and aggressive nationalism.

Over these four days of conflict, non-state actors—television news channels and social media users—used fake news, doctored images, AI-generated content, and fake accounts to amplify a pro-war narrative. 

Some called it “information warfare,” apparently an essential element in defeating Pakistan. 

While the use of false information and manipulated images has become a common tactic during elections and for driving the right-wing Hindu agenda, we asked Pratik Sinha, a co-founder of the fact-checking group Alt News, if this was the first instance of individuals promoting misinformation while proudly claiming it as a positive trait.

Sinha said that the amount of disinformation they countered this time was comparable to that of 2019, the last occasion tensions escalated between the two countries following a terrorist attack that claimed the lives of Indian soldiers in Kashmir. He also said that the right-wing in India has not felt the need to address or remove misinformation for a long time. However, this was the first instance where individuals publicly referred to spreading false information as “information warfare” and justified sharing such material.

“In the Indian context, it's the first time,” he said. 

Alt News, founded in 2007 by Sinha and Mohammed Zubair, has risen to prominence because of its efforts to counter the right wing’s extensive campaign to spread false information during the past 10 years.

“They have stopped deleting misinformation for three or four years. Who deletes these days? No one does,” said Sinha. “They have been unapologetic about misinformation for a very long time, but now they are openly saying this is our birthright, our war right.” 

Sinha said that people like them believed that they were “warriors” in the information warfare and played a crucial role in India’s victory over Pakistan.

“They are so delusional. They think they are inflicting damage. They believe they strike terror in the heart of the enemy,” he said. “They believe that lying about Karachi port actually makes an impact.” 

Sinha was referring to one of the numerous pieces of false information disseminated by news channels on 8 May, the second day of the conflict, following a flood of false information from Pakistan on the first day after India's initial attack on terrorist positions, most of which was debunked by Zubair. 

News channels on 8 May falsely reported that the Indian navy had attacked Karachi port, the Indian army had reached Islamabad and Lahore, and terrorists had carried out suicide attacks in Jammu and Punjab. 

It soon became clear that none of these things had happened.

The next morning, an account with close to 300,000 followers said what happened in the mainstream media “was not a mistake,” but it was “part of warfare”.  

Another account with close to 100,000 followers said, “In any conflict, the purpose of Information Warfare is clear: to confuse, mislead and break the thinking of the enemy. We will do this…and do it again and again. So keep these teachings of ‘credibility’, ‘free speech’ and ‘morality’ to yourself.”

In an X post on 10 May that said, “What is information warfare and why is there a need to strengthen this new front in the war against Pakistan?” a retired Indian major promoted the idea of "propaganda" and referenced Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi official who said that if a falsehood was repeated enough, it became the truth.

Goebbels was the chief propagandist of the Nazi Party, responsible for the genocide of Jews and the murder of the Romani people, people with disabilities, homosexuals, and Soviet prisoners of war.

“This is the truth of war, whether you like it or not,” the retired major said.

Two days earlier, when a Hindi news channel falsely reported that the Indian army had entered Pakistan, the same major who appeared as a talking head on the channel had declared: “It will be so much fun if the army sets fire to the Karachi port… blow up the whole city… Pakistanis, there is a naked dance of death on your head.”

Sinha said that some of these people were likely using the “information warfare” narrative to cover up their embarrassment of being wrong.  

“They are borrowing the information warfare narrative to cover up,” he said. 

It’s important to point out that the open admission of it being information warfare was peculiar in itself. 

In other cases of what has been viewed as information warfare, such as the Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential election, there was no acknowledgement from those responsible. However, that was mainly driven by the state.

“You don’t put out lies that can be easily debunked and then admit that your express agenda is lying,” said Sinha about the recent admissions of information warfare in the India-Pakistan conflict. “You don’t do that. That is not information warfare.” 

Selective Debunking 

The government and armed forces ran prominent campaigns to counter misinformation, debunking false news about terror attacks inside India during the conflict and attacks by Pakistan that never happened. These interventions seemed to be aimed at preventing panic and maintaining public order. However, they did not debunk false claims like  India’s presence in Karachi, Islamabad, and Lahore. 

“The government does not think that people putting out this lie about Karachi need to be restrained,” said Sinha. “There has not been a single statement despite the huge lie being blown up. It doesn’t matter. People believed that something happened because they were bombarded by all their information sources, and no one in authority had an issue with a lie being propagated.

Sinha agreed that the government ran significant anti-disinformation coverage, even though it might have been selective, noting that it has always been selective. 

“Disinformation is corrosion for society, and you cannot just debunk one side of disinformation, which they think is attacking the state,” said Sinha.  “If you are the government, then your responsibility is to protect society from all kinds of corrosive elements, and that includes disinformation of all kinds, and they consistently refuse to fact-check disinformation coming from the right wing.”

A significant issue is that television networks seldom clarify their mistakes or issue apologies after disseminating misinformation.

At least 21 civilians, among them four children, as well as two soldiers, lost their lives in India as a result of shelling from Pakistan during the four days of conflict that concluded with a ceasefire on 10 May.

The mainstream media hardly addressed the loss of civilian lives.

Social media and the digital age have exacerbated the problem of misinformation (false information shared without the intent to deceive) and disinformation or fake news (false information deliberately intended to mislead). 

A  major turning point came in 2016 when Russian state actors interfered with the US election by creating fake American personas and disseminating false information. 

Donald Trump’s election to the presidency of the United States in 2016 is commonly seen as the beginning of a post-truth era, during which he reportedly made more than 30,573 false statements over a four-year period.

When Covid-19 hit in 2020, a surge of misleading health information resulted in vaccine resistance and a lack of trust in scientific expertise.

The Oxford dictionary’s word of the year for 2016 was post-truth: an adjective defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”. The Collins dictionary’s word of the year for 2017 was fake news: “false, often sensational, information disseminated under the guise of news reporting”. 

‘We Should All Do It’

Considering the amount of false information that spread during the four days of the conflict, we asked Sinha about Alt News’ efforts to fact-check it.

Sinha said the challenges were not about the workload or the skills needed for fact-checking. Instead, they stemmed from the emotional and psychological impact of the "angry and hateful" material they were engaging with.

“Checking information is the easy part. It takes very little time and very little training,” he said. “The problem is the content we consume. The issue for me is constantly looking at the dark side of us. When you are constantly looking at these tweets and looking at the bloodlust.  What is shocking is numbing me.”

As Alt News has taken a leading role in countering false information and hateful narratives—many of which target Muslims—spread by the right wing and supporters of the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration, Zubair, one of the co-founders of Alt News, has faced multiple police cases with unfounded allegations, such as inciting discord among religious communities.

On the first day of the conflict, after India targeted terrorist sites in Pakistan, Zubair received significant recognition for effectively countering misinformation from Pakistan and pinpointing numerous pro-Pakistan Twitter accounts masquerading as Indian army members.

Sinha said that on the first night, Zubair addressed the misinformation all by himself and in real-time.

“Everyone was sleeping. Zubair sleeps at 4 am,” he said. “The first night, he single-handedly stayed up all night and was debunking all of that.” 

Sinha said that although Zubair deserves recognition and the whole Alt News team is committed to combating misinformation, individuals can also undertake it on their own.

“We should all do it. We have made it difficult in our minds,” he said. “It takes three days to pick it up. Very often, we are only dealing with black and white, which is easy to deal with; something is not from 2025 but 2021.”

Sinha said that ninety-five percent of the false information that emerged during the four days of the India-Pakistan conflict could be corrected using two skills: verifying images and verifying videos.

A reverse image search online can confirm the authenticity of an image, while verifying a video requires taking a screenshot and a reverse search on that image.

“It takes two days of training,” he said. “Anyone who does the training can verify, as we do.” 

(Betwa Sharma is managing editor of Article 14.)

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