Fog of war thickens as India and Pakistan trade blame and accusations
Over three nights of conflict, each country has portrayed the other as the aggressor, trading blame for civilians coming under fire along the Line of Control that separates Indian- and Pakistan-administered Kashmir, and for apparent drone and missile attacks.
On Friday, Pakistan's military said it had shot down a total of 77 drones in the conflict so far, while India's defense ministry said Pakistan targeted 36 locations (including civilian infrastructure) with almost 400 drones — many of which were shot down. India admitted some of its soldiers had been killed, without providing further details.
India's defense ministry also said on Thursday it 'neutralized' an air defense system in Lahore — a Pakistani city of 14 million people — and targeted other similar systems.
Islamabad has denied attacking any locations across its border.
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Some of the most significant claims — with Pakistan saying it killed up to 50 Indian soldiers along the Line of Control and India's defense minister telling political leaders that India killed 100 'terrorists' during Wednesday's attacks — remained difficult to independently verify.
'There is so much fog of war now,' said Milan Vaishnav, director of the South Asia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 'The full picture may never really emerge.'
Michael Kugelman, a South Asia analyst, noted a 'very high volume of particularly egregious fake news' in government-aligned Indian media outlets. (India fell to 151st position in the World Press Freedom Index by Reporters Without Borders this year, down from 136th place a decade ago. Pakistan is ranked 158th.)
Indian media outlets have over the past 24 hours claimed that Delhi has damaged or destroyed Pakistan's main port in Karachi; captured the Pakistani capital, Islamabad; that Pakistan's army chief Asim Munir may have been arrested; and that militants are taking over Quetta, a city of around 1.6 million in southwestern Pakistan.
'This is the type of fake news that pretty much everyone would know is not true,' said Kugelman, adding that the continued hostilities are a bad sign for how the crisis could play out.
'There was the option not to send any missiles or drones into the other country, but the fact that that did happen suggests that each side is not ready to step back from the brink,' he said.
Several Indian right-wing accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers have sought to add another dimension to the conflict, framing it as 'information warfare' and urging Indians to amplify any news damaging to Pakistan — regardless of its accuracy.
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Social media accounts in both India and Pakistan have circulated visuals unrelated to the current conflict, trying to pass them off as evidence of their country's dominance. Visuals being shared online that were presented as evidence of fighting included those of a February plane crash in Philadelphia, and visuals from the Israel-Gaza war
In one instance, footage from a popular military video game was shared by users on both sides of the border, with one Indian account garnering more than 2 million views.
Several claims of hacking also appeared online — with both the Pakistani Economy Ministry and the Karachi Port Trust saying their X accounts had been hacked, after their accounts published posts suggesting Pakistan had endured 'heavy losses' or that the port had been damaged.
Along with the misinformation and unverified claims, the Indian government also took measures to block enormous amounts of information.
An independent online news organization, the Wire, posted on X on Friday that the government had blocked its entire website, calling the move 'blatant censorship at a critical time for India.'
The Global Government Affairs team at X said late Thursday it had received orders from the Indian government to block more than 8,000 accounts in the country. For many accounts, X said, the government did not specify which posts violated local law; for others, it did not provide any evidence at all.
India's Information and Broadcasting Ministry issued an advisory on Thursday for streaming platforms to discontinue web series, films, and songs from Pakistan.
Rajesh Rajagopalan, an international politics professor from Jawaharlal Nehru University, said that the level of censorship in India during this ongoing conflict is 'specific to this administration.'
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'There is an effort to massage the information and not let out information that might not look good,' he said.
Experts warn that heightened nationalistic sentiment among the public not only fuels misinformation but also amplifies extreme voices, crowding out measured perspective or those advocating peace.
'The short-term impact is that if the social media discourse gets out of hand, then you have the government being forced to do certain things which it might not otherwise do in typical statecraft, because now blood has to be spilled, and that's the advantage for extreme elements,' said Joyojeet Pal, an associate professor at the University of Michigan who studies misinformation.
The United States and China have called for a diplomatic solution, but it was unclear who would lead those efforts. In a Thursday night interview with Fox News, Vice President JD Vance said the United States wants de-escalation but emphasized it is 'fundamentally none of our business,' adding that Washington will not get involved in a conflict it cannot control.
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