The Digital Frontier

Deepfakes, bots and troll farms emerge as a new weapon in the India-Pakistan conflict

- Pradip R. Sagar and Anilesh S. Mahajan

ON May 7, after India struck terrorist infrastructure inside Pakistan, Islamabad responded by lifting a 15-month-old ban on X (formerly Twitter). Though the Pakistan military's official handle remained dormant, affiliated proxies sprang into action. A deepfake video of Indian external affairs minister S. Jaishankar appearing to apologise for the strikes went viral. The Fact Check Unit of India's Press Information Bureau (PIB) quickly debunked it. In a counter-strike of sorts, another clip went viral, showing Pakistan military spokesperson Lt General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry admitting the loss of their two JF-17 jets—shared nearly 700,000 times on X before it was exposed as a fabrication by the media watchdog Bellingcat.

The battle during Operation Sindoor wasn't fought solely with fighter jets, missiles and drones. It raged just as fiercely in the digital domain—a parallel war, where deepfakes, fake advisories, doctored videos and coordinated propaganda flooded timelines. In this cognitive battlefield, perceptions—not just positions—were under siege. And truth was often the first casualty.

India, with over 500 million social media users, became both a megaphone for misinformation and a force for rebuttal. Crowdsourced fact-checking sometimes outpaced official communication. Yet, in this AI-fuelled information war, troll farms and unsuspecting users frequently countered one falsehood with another. From recycled war clips to AI-generated statements by top officials, platforms like X, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok (banned in India) turned into digital trenches.