Waging war on digital feeds: How platforms and governments fuel violence at the virtual frontline

For many activists and human rights defenders from South Asia, the beginning of the India-Pakistan conflict brought a dreaded sense of déjà vu: We’ve been here before. The hate wasn’t new, nor was the jingoism. The discourse following the Pahalgam attack on 22 April unfolded with painful predictability – accusations, denials, patriotic chest thumping – the same script India and Pakistan have been performing for over seventy years, with no sign of revision. But as with everything in today’s world, the battlefield wasn’t limited to the Line of Control – the military control line between the two countries, it had spilled into the virtual realm, on to our feeds, inside WhatsApp groups, across X timelines, into viral memes, on TV news sets dressed up as war zones, in tweet threads pretending to be journalism, and it also appeared in AI-generated videos that blurred the line between fact and fiction.The last time tensions escalated in this way, after the Pulwama attack in 2019, the disinformation was damaging but the digital terrain was still somewhat navigable. Today, that terrain has not only expanded, it’s been reshaped entirely.Back then, X was still Twitter, before Musk’s bulldozing of human rights , it still had a functioning trust and safety team. Meta had active partnerships with fact checkers, and platforms publicly signaled commitments to human rights standards, however flawed they may have been in practice. WhatsApp, though already popular, was primarily used as a way of connecting with family, friends and peers – its role as a conduit for political information, narrative setting and amplifying disinformation was still comparatively limited. YouTube has dodged scrutiny in public discourse for many years, even when the level of disinformation and hate speech that the platform spreads (and profits from) continues to increase. TikTok’s influence in 2019 was also fairly limited.Since then, digital influence has grown rapidly in both India and Pakistan. According to the latest statistics, India now has 491 million YouTube users, with 378 million on Facebook, and 27.3 million on X. In Pakistan, 81% of the population uses the internet, with 56 million people watching YouTube and 2.2 million on X. WhatsApp has become a key platform for political communication and mobilisation, especially in India, where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) relied heavily on it during the last three general elections, including the one in 2019, popularly dubbed the WhatsApp election. In 2024, BJP operated over 5 million WhatsApp groups, claiming that they can spread information nationwide within 12 minutes.While usage of social media platforms has increased in the past six years, platform safeguards have been gutted. X’s community-based moderation system has replaced expert-led oversight, with the introduction of community notes, that are often filled users’ with out-of-context, biased and/or misinterpreted information and arguments. Meta has rolled back fact-checking initiatives, alongside policy changes that now allow hate speech, if it is framed as political or religious belief. The result is an ecosystem far more vulnerable to coordinated disinformation and state manipulation than it was before.This “news” is not newFollowing the Pahalgam attack, the Indian government launched a coordinated effort to suppress independent coverage, blocking 16 Pakistani YouTube channels, removing Pakistani OTT content, and ordering X to restrict over 8,000 accounts, including those of international outlets, Kashmiri voices, and critical Indian media like Maktoob Media and The Wire. These also included accounts of international news media outlets like BBC Urdu, Kashmiri media accounts and those of Kashmiri journalists and content creators and accounts on X of Indian media who were critical or neutral in their reporting. Pakistani news websites could only be accessed by using VPNs or via the TOR browser and international media pages with relatively neutral and more balanced reporting of the conflict were largely obscured. The Indian media was instructed to rely on official briefings and statements by the government, aligned media apparatus and agencies like the Press Information Bureau, Press Trust of India and Asian News International. This left no avenue for independent verification, due to the restrictions on other sources. All of this created a fertile ground for disinformation and misinformation, fueling confusion and allowing “fake news” and false narratives to flourish.A senior government official stated that Indian authorities were deploying these measures to counter narratives that undermined the government’s position. This approach appears to have worked, as the days of the conflict saw once respected voices and well-reputed journalists generally known for their journalistic integrity, fairness and critical perspectives mislead and misinform people.Although X publicly disagreed with the order to block over 8,000 accounts, it began complying, reflecting a longstanding pattern of platform-state collusion which prioritised market access over the right to free speech. This compliance is no exception; since 2014, platforms like X have routinely followed takedown requests in order to protect access to India’s massive market. While X may have disagreed with this particular executive order by the Indian government, this is very much a consequence of placing profit over truth, factual information and people, and of capitalist collusion and decisions made over years. The mould was cast a long time ago and perfected over years, it will not be possible to break it overnight.It is also important to note that X’s recent gutting of its trust and safety programme, along with Meta’s rollback of protections for vulnerable groups, including women, its weakening of fact-checking, and its removal of diversity, equity and inclusion policies expose the hollowness of their commitment to safety. Particularly since 2014, with the sharp increase in Islamphobia in India (and the world), similar sentiments have intensified online, along with online gender-based violence (GBV) through the use of abusive and dehumanising language and anti-Muslim disinformation. Over the years, the accounts and people perpetuating online GBV and spewing Islamophobic and casteist vitriol directed at marginalised communities, especially those critical of the government, of Hindutva, or of brahmanical patriarchy, have rarely been punished or even reprimanded, and platforms have looked away at virtually every instance, allowing this activity to grow. A recent example of this was the online attacks and doxxing of Mohammed Zubair, co-founder of fact-checking platform AltNews, who played a key role in verifying news from both India and Pakistan during the conflict.This has created a culture of impunity for gendered, casteist and Islamophobic and anti-minority religion violence. The spread of anti-Muslim rhetoric by IT cells and right wing accounts in India was not by chance, but intentionally designed, rising to a crescendo during the conflict with the targeting of Muslim persons, Kashmiris, women, LGBTQ+ people, Dalit and Bahujan people and anyone who called for de-escalation and spoke up about the impacts of a war. This violence even reached the foreign secretary of India and his daughters who were targeted and doxxed after the announcement of the ceasefire.There has also been an amplification of gendered abuse by social media users in both India and Pakistan, althrough slurs and insults as well as dehumanising language that seeks to frame women as disposable in the conflict. The current crisis exposes systemic failures in platform governance. Algorithms built to maximise engagement have amplified hate, fear and violence, continuing a pattern seen in past conflicts and crises.This conflict did not just subject the public to traditional disinformation; it revealed how platforms now expose us to information that is being fully weaponised.Engagement or ammunition? There is something chilling about how fake videos – whether of explosions from past conflicts or video game footage – can go viral before any verification. It is especially insidious because we know this is not a glitch, instead it is the system functioning exactly as it was designed to. Speed is the weapon. Emotion is the trigger. And engagement is the ammunition. Every click fuels the machine and feeds a profit model that rewards virality over veracity. Verified handles, promoted posts and precision-targeted feeds all come together to create a new information ecosystem that is based on profit and persuasion, not on integrity. Both platforms and users profit from disinformation which is engineered for emotional impact.During this conflict, platforms did not merely permit the spread of falsehoods, they supercharged it. They engineered its ability to go viral, delivered it with algorithmic precision, and monetised every click along the way. With weakened moderation fuelling the spread of false and hateful narratives, what is left now is the monetary interests of the platforms and users, along with token oversight measures that fuel rather than prevent conflict.News or narratives?Unfortunately, the mainstream media did not merely mirror the online chaos, it magnified it with graphics and framed it as national truth. In India especially, television news channels played a dubious role -- studios morphed into war rooms, anchors into generals and breaking news became a spectacle of rage and warmongering. Whereas in Pakistan, the media briefly spread false claims, like a power grid failure in India, to counter Indian narratives. These were challenged by Pakistani internet users who urged their media to be more responsible in their reporting.However, the situation was different in India, where the news coverage amplified jingoistic rhetoric shaped by years of ruling party narratives. What we witnessed during this conflict was a failure of legacy media institutions in India. Many, once considered serious, now seem to be operating as extensions of state messaging or algorithmic bait. They did not only echo online disinformation, they polished it and fed it back into the ecosystem with added legitimacy.And in doing so, they gave viral falsehoods the gloss of credibility.The cost of narrative warsPlatforms and media failures, do not stay online during conflicts, they have real-world consequences. When platforms algorithmically amplify disinformation, when mainstream media reframes state propaganda as patriotic consensus and when independent fact-checkers are defunded, discredited or ignored, the result isn’t mere confusion -- it is intentional escalation.In conflict zones, misinformation and disinformation are not background noise but become tools for mobilisation. They become embedded in public consciousness, shaping not just what people believe, but how they respond. In the days following the Pahalgam attack, viral falsehoods, AI-generated videos, recycled war footage and viral lies circulated widely and were legitimised through repetition. This content did not only misinform; it primed the public to expect retaliation, to see diplomacy as a weakness and to treat critique and dissent as betrayal. Governments on both sides used digital platforms strategically, to advance their narrative -- framing it, along with global observers, as a form of “information warfare” between two nuclear-armed states. This escalation confirmed what has been evident  for years: digital platforms do not only amplify ideas -- they can also be used as calculated weapons against adversaries when the need arises. And so, very swiftly, we saw internal narratives shifting in both countries. In India, the government heavily censored online media, branding calls for de-escalation or factual reporting as “anti-national”. With independent media silenced and state channels dominating, disinformation thrived. On the other hand, in Pakistan, the government, long known for censorship and suppression of dissent, unblocked X -- previously banned in February 2024 because of “national security”. The establishment that, only a few months before, referred to the expression of dissent as “digital terrorism” and those expressing it as “digital terrorists”, now praised them in press conferences for being the “digital warriors” of the armed forces and an asset against India in its information war.Amid this war-driven climate, space for democratic discourse vanished and was replaced by a binary: us versus them, war versus betrayal. Inflamed public sentiment allowed governments to justify extraordinary measures, information blackouts, sweeping censorship, mass blocking of content and the silencing of critical voices, all under the banner of national security. Amidst this “information warfare”, the realities of people living in Kashmir, on both sides, especially close to the Line of Control, slowly vanished from the news, with only Kashmiri media outlets and content creators sharing information from the ground.In moments of armed crisis, what is at stake is not only online discourse, but democracy itself -- its institutions, freedoms, and the public’s ability to resist reactive nationalism.The business of warAt one end chaos reigns; at the other, billionaires get richer. Just as arms manufacturers track the battlefield performance of missiles to boost their stock prices, tech giants monitor engagement metrics, no matter how harmful, to fuel their profit margins. Social media companies complete the supply chain of modern conflict: fuelling polarisation, amplifying rage and selling attention to the highest bidder. In this economy of war, every click is currency, and every viral lie a profitable asset. The only ones paying the price are the people caught in this business cycle.This conflict has made one thing clear: the digital battlefield is now central, not peripheral, to the design and act of war. Platforms must move beyond disclaimers and implement real (and real-time) crisis protocols, transparent moderation not reliant on AI and algorithms and informed by local and regional contexts and independent oversight. The press must reject spectacle in favour of responsibility, prioritise fact over fiction and pursue independence over influence. If platforms keep monetising outrage, if governments continue to exploit chaos and if the media remains complicit, the cost will not only be truth; it will be paid also in lives lost to war and the collapse of a democratic space where peace can survive.