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Published : 08 May 2025, 01:21 AM
A torrent of fabricated content purporting to be from India’s strikes on Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir is gaining millions of views on social media, the BBC has reported.
The Pakistani military has said it destroyed five jets on Wednesday morning local time in retaliation to India’s strikes. So far 31 people in Pakistan have been reported dead in the strikes, while India said 10 of their citizens had died.
Dramatic clips circulating on social media debunked by BBC Verify have claimed to show attacks on an Indian army base and an Indian fighter jet shot down in Pakistan.
One video, which had more than 400,000 views on X at the time of writing, claiming to show an explosion caused by a Pakistani response was actually from the 2020 Beirut Port explosion in Lebanon, the report said.
The BBC cited an expert to report that in moments of heightened tension or dramatic events, misinformation is more likely to spread and fuel distrust and hostility.
"It's very common to see recycled footage during any significant event, not just conflict," Eliot Higgins, the founder of the Bellingcat investigations website, was quoted as saying.
"Algorithmic engagement rewards people who post engaging content, not truthful content, and footage of conflict and disasters is particularly engaging, no matter the truth behind it," he added.
One of the most viral clips, which gained over 3 million views on X in a matter of hours, claimed to show blasts caused by the Indian strikes on Pakistan-administered Kashmir. A search for screengrabs from the video on Google found the footage actually showed Israeli strikes on the Gaza Strip on Oct 13, 2023, the report, drawn from analysis by BBC Verify, suggested.
While much of the debunked footage has purported to show the immediate aftermath of the Indian strikes, some clips appeared to be trying to portray the Pakistani response as being more severe than it actually was, it added.
One video, which has racked up almost 600,000 views on X, claimed to show that the "Pakistan army blew up the Indian Brigade headquarters". The clip, which shows blasts in the darkness, is actually from an unrelated video circulating on YouTube as early as last month, BBC Verify found.
A set of photos purported to show an operation carried out by the Pakistan Air Force targeting "Indian forward air bases in the early hours of May 6, 2025", but the images - which appeared to be captured by a drone - were actually screengrabs taken from the video game Battlefield, the BBC’s analysis revealed.
The report said two widely shared images actually showed previous Indian Air Force jet crashes - one from an incident in Rajasthan in 2024 and another in the Punjab state in 2021. Both crashes were widely reported.
The conflict in Kashmir has long attracted a high degree of misinformation online. In the aftermath of the deadly militant attack on Indian tourists in Pahalgam last month, AI images circulated - with some seeking to dramatise actual scenes from the attack.
