Disinformation warfare

As EU DisinfoLab exposes a 15-year ongoing ‘hybrid’ operation against Pakistan, information warfare is as real as it gets. The New Delhi-based Srivastava Group was found using subversive instruments including fake news, identity theft and cyber terrorism that greatly damaged the cause of Kashmir and CPEC.

Another example of such information warfare was the use of algorithmic manufacturing of consent by the Mexican political elite through creation of false universes of ghost followers and bots to generate tweets and hiring trolls to silence dissident voices. Data company Mesura revealed the use of ‘hybrid’ tactics to build online support for controversial energy reforms by systematically attacking dissident voices when a group of 132 students protested against the biased coverage of election campaigns in 2012 and the overall political engineering by the incumbent government, The Yo Soy 132 movement was later hijacked by Manuel Cossío who offered to manage the group’s social media. Manuel was actually working for the Mexican Secret Service who infiltrated the movement, stole data and destabalised power balances within the movement by leaking controversial videos before the elections.

The same algorithmic construction of consent and artificial sabotage of dissent were used by the Indian government in its hybrid war against Pakistan. However, the modus operandi of Indian disinformation campaign is more complex and resembles a typical money laundering operation. Just as a money laundering machine tries to make the source of illegal money difficult to detect, Indian propaganda machinery attempts to make the source of ‘fake’ news literally untraceable.

If we draw parallels of money laundering with information laundering, then we can see the first stage is ‘placement’ of fake news outlets in Geneva besides resurrecting defunct UNHRC non-profit organisations with intent to impersonate them. These outlets generate fake content and compose misleading opinion pieces that are legitimised and ‘layered’ when distributed through mainstream Indian media, especially the Asian News International (ANI) news agency. Fake news is presented, re-tweeted and shared in such a way that gullible Indian audience won’t even question the source of news and takes it as authentic — completing the last step of ‘integrating’ with mainstream media.

The state-sponsored media in Jammu and Kashmir is often found broadcasting fake history of Kashmir over radio and TV — with an attempt to weaken the narrative of the indigenous Kashmiri movement. Twitter accounts of Kashmiri freedom fighters are often hacked and attacked by paid trolls in order to discredit them.

This hybrid warfare will become increasingly problematic as fake news is developing in a context where the media industry is experiencing a deep crisis. With advertising revenue in decline, journalists getting laid off and support staff getting pay cuts; the fault lines in media are getting prominent and it is more prone to paid ‘fake’ news phenomenon. In an era of such dis-information warfare, Pakistan’s policy response to such hybrid threads should be led at a high level — probably at the forum of the National Security Council. Multi-disciplinary committees comprising political and media specialists may be set up at NSC to identify hybrid warfare campaigns in place and should report back to the executive board. Action should be taken to penalise those media outlets that deliberately engineer fake news in pursuit of their special interests and stories of their malpractices should be disseminated at the international level. We may also consider setting up think-tanks similar to the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, which was established in Finland to deliberate on alternative responses to hybrid threats from Russia.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 7^th, 2021.

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