Alarm at the spread of false information about the coronavirus on social media platforms is echoing fears raised over the impact of social media as nuclear-armed India and Pakistan teetered precipitously on the brink of all-out war last year.

After a suicide bombing triggered the conflict on Valentine’s Day 2019, fake news and doctored videos seen by millions of users circulated on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other platforms as the conflict escalated.

In the corona pandemic, the circulation of malicious and incorrect information has sown public confusion about the coronavirus pandemic and threatens safety, say health experts and the World Health Organization (WHO).

Last year’s conflict between India and Pakistan ended peacefully five weeks after it began. However, the global information system of which social media platforms are a part may be remaking the rules of war and contributing new dangers to already unstable relations between the two nuclear powers.

In the new information order the speed at which information can be delivered cheaply, and the ease with which it can be manipulated, leaves human cognition outpaced and prone to error. Changing the information system is the only option, experts say.

On February 14, 2019, a 22-year-old Kashmiri jihadist drove his car packed with three hundred kilograms of explosives into an Indian paramilitary police convoy in the Pulwama district of India-administered Kashmir, leaving more than forty Indian soldiers dead. Jaish e Mohammad, a Pakistan-based terrorist organization, claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing.

Twelve days later, Indian air force jets launched a retaliatory cross-border strike on an alleged terrorist training camp near Balakot, deep in Pakistani territory provoking a counter-attack by Pakistan in which an Indian MiG-21 fighter jet was shot down. As the situation threatened to spiral out of control, both countries mobilized their armed forces and moved tanks to the frontlines.

The crisis significantly raised the stakes in the more than seventy-year territorial dispute over Kashmir, a major flashpoint in their relations, and heightened international fears of renewed military confrontation.

This was the first time since the India-Pakistan War of 1971 that fighter planes had crossed the Line of Control, the unofficial border dividing Kashmir. It also demonstrated a new willingness on India’s part to strike deep into Pakistan territory and Pakistan’s determination to respond swiftly to establish strategic balance.

The combined effect of electronic media and social media the crisis set a new precedent for South Asia, said Feroz Khan, a former brigadier in the Pakistan army and research professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

The use of social media to spread fake news and disinformation to impact on politics is completely new, he said in an interview, although information warfare has always been part of statecraft during wars and peace.

Both governments used social media to spread fake news, Khan said. The Modi-led BJP government in India used social media to advance its political ambitions with looming elections and managed to turn a failed military operation into political victory by making an incredible claim of a MIG-21 shooting down an F-16. Simultaneously, he said, Pakistan also used social media to fudge the fact a U.S.-made F- 16 was not used when it was a Chinese-Pakistan JF 17. 

With multiple delivery means at their disposal and by exploiting social media as a tool to achieve political purposes, nuclear-armed India and Pakistan risked the strategy going dangerously wrong, said Khan. Fake news was blurring the nuclear redlines further and thickening the fog of war, he said.

There was a lot of baying for blood for retaliation and to up the ante from both sides, Vipin Narang, associate professor of political science at MIT told a nuclear policy conference after the conflict. Had Twitter existed during the Kargil War twenty years earlier, he said, India and Pakistan may have gone nuclear.

In South Asia, inflated claims on social media can make it harder to manage and de-escalate crises, said Andrew Futter, a UK academic and authority on cyber-nuclear security at Leicester University. 

“Unlike the numerous near misses and periods of tension experienced by the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, the geographical proximity of nuclear forces in South Asia, the lack of trust and predictability, and the concurrent pressure to act quickly makes the risk of accidents, miscalculation, unintended escalation and nuclear use much higher today than in the past,” he said.

The current information ecosystem, the habitat of social media platforms, increasingly poses risks to crisis stability says Ben Loehrke, one of the authors of “Three Tweets to Midnight: Effects of the Global Information Ecosystem on the Risk of Nuclear Conflict.” 

The new study spells out how social media could contribute to international conflict—including the failure of deterrence and nuclear war, and calls for measures to minimize the impact of bad information on crisis decisionmaking.

Manipulated information can also be used by partisan actors with a variety of agendas to put pressure on leaders to act, Loehrke said. 

The disruptive effects of social media needs reassessment of how existing frameworks for understanding crisis stability might be affected by the evolution of today’s information ecosystem, according to a report by Three Tweets to Midnight.

“Human cognition is unlikely to change significantly on anything less than an evolutionary scale, so that means the information ecosystem needs to be modified to minimize the impact of bad information on crisis decision making,” the report concludes.

After the Pulwama attack, the spike in misinformation circulating in India was so alarming that Trushar Barot, head of Facebook India’s efforts to counter fake news, tweeted “I’ve never seen anything like this before—the scale of fake content circulating on one story.” 

The challenge with misinformation is that social media users are repeatedly exposed to fake content. According to a report by the Internet Institute of Oxford University, computational propaganda is becoming “a pervasive and ubiquitous part of everyday life.”

Although Facebook tried to keep up with weeding out misinformation and preventing the dissemination of false claims during the conflict it was met with only partial success.

India’s The Wire news website reported that three of Facebook’s seven fact-checking partners—India Today, Dainik Jagran, and Newsmobile—were themselves circulating misinformation following the Pulwama attack. 

In India’s general election in 2019, nine hundred million voters went to the polls; Facebook India had an eleven to twelve-member team fact-checking content, the New York Times reported.

In last February’s conflict, Pakistan vigorously pursued the information war with a series of tweets and pictures from its Inter-Services Public Relations spokesman within hours of the airstrikes. A video message later by Prime Minister Imran Khan urged India to join Pakistan in de-escalating the crisis. 

By the time India commented fully, days later, social media was awash with posts based largely on Pakistan’s narrative. This, Indian Military Intelligence claimed, was because Pakistan’s Inter-Services account operates twenty thousand fake social media handles, or usernames, and was able to create doubts by spreading misinformation. 

In India, social media warriors sought revenge for the Pulwama terrorist attack that killed more than forty Indian servicemen by using #RevengePulwama; #JusticeforPulwama and played on a public sense of grievance concerning India’s perceived victimhood and the belief that Pakistan should be taught a lesson.

Similarly, in Pakistan, cross border skirmishes with India on the Line of Control regardless of the casualty toll, generate considerable anger on social media.

In this atmosphere, where nuclear weapons play a key role in maintaining strategic deterrence, developments such as the modernization of existing weaponry, arms deployments, and India’s “Cold Start” military doctrine trigger massive coverage on social media. In 2015, when Pakistan launched its Shaheen three missiles, Facebook and Twitter, were crowded with euphoric messages about the need to deter India with robust countermeasures. 

Yet amid the charged atmosphere of the Pulwama-Balakot crisis, a small but significant minority on social media platforms advocated for peace, hinting at prospects for economic prosperity and the betterment of both Indian and Pakistani populations as the price to pay if a war broke out between the two nuclear-armed rivals. 

Pakistani activist for female education and the youngest-ever Nobel Prize Laureate, Malala Yousafzai tweeted: “Everyone aware of the horrors of war would agree that retaliation and revenge is never the right response.”

After the funeral of Squadron Leader Ninad Mandavgane, one of the six Indian Air Force officers killed in a helicopter crash in Budgam, Kashmir, on February 27, his wife Vijeta Mandavgane, said: “I ask Facebook warriors to stop conducting war on Facebook and other social media. Nothing will come of this . . . We do not want war; you have no idea about the destruction of war.” 

Among international observers of Pakistan, the perception is that in a crisis with India the response on social media platforms is stronger from conservative clergy, right-wing groups and military sources than from people of relatively liberal backgrounds. 

But there was a massive response on social media in both Pakistan and India and when Pakistan posted images of Indian Air Force pilot Abhinandan Varthaman, captured after his plane was shot down.

Hashtags such as #SayNoToWar and #BringAbhinandanBack trended heavily on social media as users on both sides came together to condemn war-mongering and hatred, demanding his dignified treatment and swift release, in line with the Geneva Convention 

Prime Minister Imran Khan’s subsequent decision to release Varthaman days later was widely hailed as a gesture of peace and led to a de-escalation of the immediate crisis.

In spite of anger over India’s violation of Pakistan’s airspace during the Balakot incident, few social media opinion makers in Pakistan rushed to fan the flames of war with repeated calls for peace. Hussain Nadim, a former advisor to Pakistan on matters of security, planning and foreign policy, said in a tweet, “Not gonna lie but in this entire hashtag India-hashtag Pakistan fiasco in recent days I’ve found a new respect for Pakistani journalists, analysts, celebrities & twitter folks. No calls for war, jingoism or hate-mongering with India.”

Facebook and Twitter were introduced to the South Asian countries in 2006 and have left an indelible mark and a significant impact on society in both countries attracting millions of users. Together with platforms such as WhatsApp, YouTube and Instagram, they have become major disseminators of news and opinion among users. 

Yet the platforms do not have a uniform effect on crisis dynamics, says MIT’s Narang. Different social media platforms can have a differing impact.  Open social media platforms such as Twitter, for example, are more likely to thicken the fog of war in acute crises and can be used for external signaling to a larger target audience—adversaries and a broader international community. 

Taberez Ahmed Neyazi of the University of Singapore analyzed Twitter data from two crises in 2016 between India and Pakistan—a terrorist attack on Indian security forces near the town of Uri in Kashmir and India’s subsequent “Surgical Strikes” on Pakistan.

His study, “Digital Propaganda, Digital Bots, and Polarized Politics in India,” reported that online public opinion had been manipulated, dissent suppressed and activists’ voices diminished.

A digital social media analyst in Pakistan, speaking on the condition of anonymity said Twitter has an immediate impact within the political community and is a powerful tool for engaging audiences and shaping public opinion. Tweets with hashtags also have a greater impact because they allow for social bonding similar to Facebook, but are more orientated towards issues and debates in Pakistan, she said. 

Celebrities and religious leaders exert considerable influence over their millions of followers and in Pakistan can have a significant bearing on the public's attitudes towards a national crisis. The official Twitter account of Pakistan’s prime minister, for example, has nearly eleven million followers, while the director-general of the Inter-Services Public Relations, the media wing of Pakistan’s Armed Forces which coordinates and disseminates military news and information to the general public, has close to 3.3 million followers. 

In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is one of the top Indian influencers on social media with more than forty-nine million Twitter followers. The second most popular Twitter account is that of Bollywood star Shahrukh Khan, who has nearly thirty-nine million followers.

Twitter has also been adopted by nationalist and extremist groups seeking to promote their political agendas by way of hashtags, such as the Pakistan Cyber Force and, in India, Clean the Nation.

In August 2019 when Modi stripped Kashmir off of its special status by abrogating Article 370 and taking away its semi-autonomy in the process, tweets from Pakistani politicians, celebrities and other opinion-makers hinted at utter disgust and condemnation. Prominent comedian, Ahmed Ali Butt, was quick to denounce Modi’s actions and tweeted: “Speak up and stop the madness. Stop killing innocent people.”

India and Pakistan will continue to be at loggerheads due to triggers such as India’s clampdown in Kashmir, the rise of Hindu nationalism, Pakistan’s inability to take effective action against militant groups based on its territory, and a quantitative and qualitative nuclear arms race in the region. As social media gives the public a voice, discussion of these differences and triggers will only become shriller and more amplified in this digital age but will afford a few solutions. 

Sylvia Mishra is a researcher based in Washington DC working on nuclear strategy and South Asia 

Hamzah Rifaat is a broadcast journalist based in Islamabad.

Image: Reuters