NEW DELHI — When India launched Operation Sindoor on May 7, 2025, two conflicts began simultaneously. The first was a military operation involving missiles, Rafale jets, and precision strikes on nine targets across Pakistan. The second was a WhatsApp operation involving your Chacha, forty-seven unverified forwards, a video that claimed to show the Karachi port being destroyed but was actually footage from a 2006 video game called Battlefield 2, and a voice note from someone's "defence ministry source" that turned out to be a man in Rohini with strong opinions and poor judgment.

Fact-checkers at Alt News, The Quint's WebQoof, and BOOM spent the entire week watching hours of Call of Duty footage looking for the exact clip that Indian news channels had broadcast as live war coverage. They found it. They published the debunk. The debunk was shared five hundred times. The original video game clip had been shared four million times. This is the information ecosystem India is operating in. It is not designed for truth. It is designed for sharing.

The full menu of fabrications included: deepfakes of Shehbaz Sharif admitting defeat, deepfakes of Modi apologising to Pakistan, a doctored letter about nuclear leakage at Kirana Hills, claims that Indian forces had entered Lahore, claims that Pakistan's entire air force had been grounded, and a viral video of an Indian news anchor throwing a chair that turned out to be AI-generated because the chair changed colour mid-throw. The chair changing colour is the detail this reporter cannot stop thinking about. Someone made a deepfake. Chose a chair as the prop. Did not render the chair correctly. Forty lakh people shared it anyway.