Amid heightened military tensions between India and Pakistan, a surge of misleading content has flooded social media, with several unrelated videos falsely presented as footage from recent cross-border strikes.

Fact-checking by BBC Verify revealed that many viral clips – including those claiming to show attacks on Indian army bases or fighter jets being shot down – were either old or taken from unrelated events. One widely circulated video, viewed over 400,000 times on X, was presented as a Pakistani counterstrike but was actually footage from the 2020 Beirut port explosion.

Another viral clip, falsely claimed to show Indian strikes on Pakistan-administered Kashmir, turned out to be footage of Israeli air raids on Gaza from October 2023. In a more extreme case, images supposedly depicting a Pakistani air operation were traced back to the video game Battlefield 3.

Experts say misinformation spikes during crises. Eliot Higgins, founder of Bellingcat, noted that social media algorithms reward engagement over accuracy, making conflict-related visuals easy targets for manipulation.

Following Pakistan’s claim of downing five Indian jets, several unrelated clips were shared purporting to show wreckage. However, two prominent images were confirmed to be from earlier Indian Air Force crashes — one in 2024 in Rajasthan, the other in Punjab in 2021.

Even official sources have misstepped. One clip circulated by Pakistani military accounts was later withdrawn after being proven unrelated.

Prof Indrajit Roy of the University of York warned that such content is often designed to stoke nationalism and hostility. Journalist Vedika Bahl added that much of this misinformation starts on X before filtering into WhatsApp, amplifying its reach across South Asian communities.

Source: BBC

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