Many Indian television channels looked like an animated video game, with graphics and crude sounds, from 7 to 10 May, when India and Pakistan dropped air missiles on each other before what looks like a temporary pause in violence now.

On 9 May, Times Now Navbharat, an Indian Hindi news channel which claims to be one of the most widely watched in the country, carried a peculiar piece of news.

The screen showed barbed wire at the bottom, a soldier with a machine gun in his hands, a tank moving ahead menacingly, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi standing tall on the left-hand side. “Indian forces enter into Pakistan,” the Hindi text read on a bold red backdrop. Fighter jets swooshed on the screen and an excited anchor’s voice boomed over it. “Indian forces have entered Pakistan,” he echoed, clapping his hands in excitement. “We have entered Pakistan”

This visual cut to seven panelists, each in an on-screen box. While one female panellist gave a thumbs up, another person opened his arms like an athlete winning a game and the main anchor cheered on with clenched fists. “Now it would be a lot of fun if the Navy set fire to the Karachi port,” the anchor said.

Then the channel showed what they claimed was footage from Pakistan’s port city of Karachi. Several TV channels carried the news of India having “invaded” Karachi. Some even said that the Indian army had invaded Islamabad and bombed the city of Lahore.

All of these reports turned out to be false.

While it is true that India and Pakistan used their respective air forces to launch missiles into each other’s territory, neither crossed the border into another’s territory. Both countries share 70 years of hostilities and have fought four wars. In the past decade alone, they have locked horns at least three times.

The latest escalation of violence came after gunmen killed 26 tourists in a meadow in Indian administered Kashmir. India blames Pakistan for the attacks, an allegation Pakistan denies.

Journalists and neutral observers across the world have noted how dangerous it could be for India and Pakistan to be in a state of war, not only because they possess nuclear weapons but also because it may drag in other regional powers such as China and Turkey.

That did not stop social media, TV channels and YouTubers from spreading false claims during the four days of military action, which the Indian government called Operation Sindoor.

“I have observed misinformation surrounding Gaza, Ukraine and Palestine, but since those were longer conflicts that escalated over months, the misinformation trickled out over several days,” said Uzair Rizvi, a Delhi-based fact-checker and media literacy trainer. “This situation felt as if a month’s worth of misinformation bombarded social media within the first few hours. By the end of 7 May, I had examined about 70 unique posts of misinformation. Considering all these posts were shared thousands of times, the extent of misinformation was immense,” he added.

Unapologetic about spreading fake news

As fact-checkers began calling out fake news on Indian social media, many Indian accounts began defending themselves on X. “They are delusional and unapologetic,” said Pratik Sinha, co-founder of fact-checking website Alt News.

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

Some Indian right-wing accounts even praised each other for wilfully spreading false information. “The crux of the argument here [was] that Pakistani media was running false information, so Indian media shouldn’t be blamed for running false information,” said Sinha on X.

Major Gaurav Arya, editor-in-chief of a right-wing think tank, took to X to explain how this is an era of “propaganda” and even referenced Nazi minister Joseph Goebbels.

Fake news was spread with so much impunity that even the government agencies began issuing fact checks on their official X accounts. In a statement, the Network of Women in Media said: “Several media outlets ignored even the Indian government’s official clarifications… that debunked such footage as outdated or manipulated.”

Anatomy of a crisis

In order to learn what happened during those four days of violence between India and Pakistan, it is important to understand how false claims and misleading narratives were spread the previous time there was such violence between the two countries.

On 14 February 2019, a suicide bomber attacked an Indian army convoy and killed 40 soldiers in Pulwama district of Indian Kashmir. In retaliation, the Indian air force bombed an alleged training camp of Jaish-e-Mohammad, a terrorist group, in Balakot, Pakistan.

At the time the Indian government claimed they had killed 300 alleged terrorists. But the Reuters news agency used satellite images to report that the training camp was exactly as it was. “The images are virtually unchanged from an April 2018 satellite photo of the facility,” the Reuters report said. “There are no discernible holes in the roofs of buildings, no signs of scorching, blown-out walls, displaced trees around the school or other signs of an aerial attack.”

There were no videos from Pakistan of any casualties or damage either.

This time, fact-checkers said, as soon as India launched the attack, Indian authorities held press conferences to show images which detailed the impact of the strikes.

“This somehow satisfied Indian audiences. They didn’t feel the need to rapidly generate fake information. Indian social media took a back seat at this point,” said Jency Jacob, Managing Editor of BOOM, a fact-checking website.

However, Jacob told me that misinformation surged on 7 May, in the early hours of the Indian attack, with Pakistani X accounts posting fake videos of air strike sites and damaged buildings. On the next day all hell broke loose on the Indian side as well.

24-hour news thrives on adrenaline-driven stories. So this might be the reason why many TV channels showed some of these false claims. Jacob, who has worked for leading TV channels in the past, said that the channels may have not been happy with the limited flow of information from the government. “They come under pressure from millions of voyeuristic audiences,” he said.

That’s when Indian TV channels began claiming that Indian forces had entered Pakistan.

This time around, Sinha from Alt News said, it became very clear that the news media were primarily addressing audiences in their own country. “Truth is the casualty,” he said, while emphasising that the media is not trying to unearth facts or hold its own governments to account but just trying to cater to the emotions of the masses.

Fake news mainly generated on X, said Rizvi, the Delhi-based fact-checker, “but what originated on X then seeped into TV channels, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram.”

This time, fact-checked news also followed the same path, said Sinha from Alt-News: “Our fact-checks also trickled into WhatsApp and other YouTubers began quoting us.”

Blocking credible sources

The misinformation problem was exacerbated when some credible news sources were blocked by Indian authorities.

Immediately after the attack on tourists on 22 April, the Indian government blocked about a dozen Pakistani YouTube channels, including those of established news outlets like Dawn.

Then, when air missiles were being launched into each other’s territories, the Indian government ordered X to block local access to about 8,000 accounts belonging to influential Pakistanis, Kashmiris and some Indians too. X reluctantly agreed to comply.

Online censorship was not enough. Indian authorities arrested freelance journalist Hilal Mir calling him a “radical social media user” and accusing him of disseminating “extremist/distorted content with an intention to disturb peace,” according to a report in the Kashmir Times, whose editor-in-chief Anuradha Bhasin also had her X account suspended.

Another Kashmiri journalist, Rejaz M. Sheeba Sydeek, has reportedly also been arrested for an online post criticising India’s moves against Pakistan.

Independent news outlet The Wire, was blocked for about 24-hours. Eventually, the block was lifted after the outlet agreed to take down an article reporting Pakistan’s claim to have shot down a French-made Indian fighter jet. The Wire called the order “unfair.”