ISLAMABAD – A communications blackout in India’s powderkeg Kashmir regionis fuelling a fake news war with Pakistan, as both sides unleash a delugeof disinformation to fill the vacuum and shape opinion.
India cut access to Kashmir’s internet and phone lines in August as itsought to contain the fallout of its decision to revoke the region’sautonomy.
The stripping of autonomy triggered fury in neighbouring Pakistan, whichalso claims the Muslim-majority territory, as well as the region’s sevenmillion people.
While landlines and mobile phones have since been restored, internetremains cut and foreign journalists have been unable to enter.
In the absence of real news from Kashmir, waves of false information haveemerged online.
“Both sides are stoking tensions, and both sides benefit from theinformation vacuum to fill the void with their own narratives and push themto domestic and international audiences,” said Jan Rydzak, who hasresearched related topics at Stanford University.
“Pakistan cannot afford to let (the Indian) government’s’business-as-usual’ narrative flood its citizens’ social media feeds; Indiacannot afford to let reports of mass incarceration and chaos flood theirs.”
Disinformation has ranged from old photos from Gaza purportedly showing howIndia has turned Kashmir into a “living hell”, to old images of happychildren falsely claiming all is well in “the new Kashmir”.
These have been identified by AFP’s fact-checking unit, which has reportedon dozens of pieces of Kashmir-related disinformation from both sides sincethe crisis began.
From India, media outlets with millions of Twitter or Facebook followershave shared manipulated or out-of-context photos and videos to paint a rosypicture of life in the Kashmir Valley.
The Eid al-Adha festival, a major religious holiday for Muslims, was anearly battlefront in the fake news war, occurring about a week afterKashmir’s autonomy was revoked.
In the regional capital of Srinagar on that day, a curfew was in place,thousands of extra troops patrolled the streets and its main mosque wasordered shut.
Online, however, images circulated widely alongside false claims theyshowed people praying at mosques in Srinagar.
– ‘Digital siege’ –
In Pakistan, meanwhile, old, unrelated videos have been viewed millions oftimes in misleading posts about Kashmir shared by top politicians andjournalists.
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In one instance, a 2016 video showing a huge crowd at a funeral was postedon Twitter by cabinet minister Ali Haider Zaidi, who claimed it showedmillions of people rallying against the revoking of autonomy.
Hamid Mir, a Pakistani journalist with more than five million followers onTwitter, also shared a video he claimed showed the Indian army usingcivilians as human shields — but the footage was from 2018.
Mir deleted his tweet later after being called out on Twitter byfact-checkers.
For Mumbai-based investigative journalist Rana Ayyub, the disinformation onIndian social media is part of a concerted effort by authorities to obscurea true picture of the situation in Kashmir.
“The government is trying to counter this with misinformation showingmisleading images to depict everything as normal,” she told AFP.
Ayyub said Indian authorities went further in accusing international mediaoutlets “of spreading fake news” when they report accurately on thesituation.
She referred to Indian authorities repeatedly denying there had been anymajor protests or violence in Srinagar, dismissing video reports by the BBCand other global news organisations as inaccurate.
However authorities eventually admitted there had been “widespread unrest”in the city.
In Pakistan, the disinformation is driven partly by practical constraintsdue to a misplaced desire to draw attention to the issue, according toShahzad Ahamd, a digital rights activist at Islamabad-based NGO Byte forAll.
“People are using old images and videos to highlight the plight ofKashmiris,” Ahamd told AFP, but added the strategy was backfiring.
“Fake news is not helping, rather it has clouded the actual human miserythere.”
Rydzak, most recently a scholar at Stanford University’s Global DigitalPolicy Incubator, said there were no winners in the fake-news war.
“We don’t know exactly how the circulation of information has changed as aresult of this ‘digital siege’, but it has made the task of verifying anddebunking rumours harder to fulfil and the overall situation harder tocontrol,” he said. -APP/AFP