What war hysteria hides: deaths, destruction, disinformation

Intense public interest in war-related news amid India-Pakistan conflict, fueled by misinformation, with significant human and economic costs.

The military escalation between India and Pakistan following the Pahalgam massacre has been accompanied by a barrage of misinformation and disinformation. Data shows that concerned citizens, particularly from the border areas, have intensely searched for war-related news since the recent conflict between the nuclear powers started.

Over the past two weeks, public interest in war-related topics surged to the highest levels in recent times in India (Chart 1). Google searches for terms such as ‘war’ and ‘Pakistan’ hit the highest point in five years.

Chart 1 | This shows the interest in terms such as ‘war’ and related topics in the last five years in India on Google. The value 100 corresponds to the peak number of searches in the given time period

Searches for the terms ‘nuclear’ and ‘drones’ also peaked. This shows a spike in both curiosity and anxiety as tensions kept escalating.

However, many online searches led to events that never actually happened. An examination of the ‘news events’ that were debunked by fact-checkers following Operation Sindoor shows the extent and nature of fake narratives in circulation.

One prominent example was the viral fake news about the ‘destruction of Karachi port’, shared by a user on X and viewed over 2.5 million times. The image was actually from an Israeli air strike on Rafah in Gaza. Another widely circulated and inflammatory post claimed that an Indian drone had struck an area near a mosque in Islamabad; that was, in fact, a fire accident from the previous year.

A search on AltNews, a fact-checking platform, reveals the many hyper-nationalistic claims that have been circulating on social media handles in both Pakistan and India. These posts have often been accompanied by commentary — subtle or explicit — calling for war. Such commentary tends to obscure the harshest reality of war — its toll on human lives.