An average Indian spends upwards of five hours on the internet daily, with 70 percent of the time devoted to social media platforms, gaming, and videos (Ashish Pherwani, 2025). It would be no surprise to anyone who sees young toddlers in India demanding YouTube during mealtime or students secretly making reels in classrooms or uncles incessantly forwarding the latest claims about ancient India that they received on their WhatsApp. Social media has replaced news channels, movie theaters and television, all at once. It does seem harmless, except for a few heated arguments between family members, lectures by teachers on harms of ChatGPT, the cost of spending time on internet doesn’t seem that high when data prices are negligible. Social scientists may go on and on about how the sense of anonymity provided by social media has turned us into hate-mongering trolls that we actually aren’t and how it is pulling at our social fabric, but yet on usual days, the cost doesn’t seem that high and the risks abstract. But what happens during times of crisis when cost of one unverified or irresponsible forward would be the lives of many?
This is exactly what happened in the past days, when amidst an escalating armed conflict with its neighbour, India also fell prey to an ‘information warfare’, unleashed by its adversary causing panic and chaos amongst millions of people. In the past days, Indian social media was flooded with misinformation regarding the scale of conflict, number of causalities, and level of external interference. It is true that in tense times, some disinformation can be predicted to do rounds, but such was the scale of misinformation and disinformation that amidst the fog of war, it was difficult to determine which news is true and which false. This information warfare was certainly unleashed by our adversary, who after an year-long ban restored Twitter, so as to open the floodgates of misinformation and set a favorable narrative. But we cannot cry wolf as we fell easy prey to such tactics as there were many Indian accounts passing video games clips to be real videos from sensitive areas and Indian parliamentarians sharing unverified news, some from Pakistani handles and even legacy media proved more un-trustworthy than ever. Such was the state that government agencies issued multiple advisories advising restraint, caution and reminding of past incidents where sensationalization put lives at risk and banned multiple accounts.
