Internet shutdown fuels fake news battle in Kashmir

A communications blackout in India’s powderkeg Kashmir region is fuelling a fake news war with Pakistan, as both sides unleash a deluge of disinformation to fill the vacuum and shape opinion.

India cut access to Kashmir’s Internet and phone lines in August as it sought to contain the fallout of its decision to revoke the region’s autonomy.

The stripping of autonomy triggered fury in Pakistan, which also claimed the Muslim-majority territory, as well as the region’s seven million people.

While landlines and mobile phones had been restored, Internet remained cut and foreign journalists had been unable to enter.

In the absence of real news from Kashmir, waves of false information emerged online.

“Both sides are stoking tensions, and both sides benefit from the information vacuum to fill the void with their own narratives and push them to domestic and international audiences,” said Jan Rydzak, who had researched related topics at Stanford University.

“Pakistan cannot afford to let (the Indian) government’s ‘business-as-usual’ narrative flood social media feeds; India cannot afford to let reports of mass incarceration and chaos flood theirs.”

Disinformation ranged from old photos from Gaza purportedly showing how India has turned Kashmir into a “living hell”, to old images of happy children falsely claiming all is well in “the new Kashmir”.

From India, media outlets had shared manipulated or out-of-context photos and videos to paint a rosy picture of life in Kashmir.

Aidiladha was an early battlefront in the fake news war, occurring about a week after Kashmir’s autonomy was revoked.

In the regional capital of Srinagar on that day, a curfew was in place, thousands of extra troops patrolled the streets and its main mosque was ordered shut.

Online, however, images circulated widely alongside false claims they showed people praying at mosques in Srinagar.