Deutsche Welle (DW) does a good job of fact-checking some of the more lurid political claims doing the rounds of the world's social media. Most recently it has looked into the videos being circulated by both Pakistan and India about their growing military spat over incursions into and retailations over, Indian-held Kashmir.
Perhaps not surprisingly, DW concludes that almost all of the video propaganda being promoted by both sides is in fact false.
For example, footage purporting to show Indian missiles raining down on Pakistan, shared at least 5 million times by outraged viewers, was in fact taken over 7 months ago and actually shows Iranian missiles hitting Israel. A picture showing a wrecked Fench-designed Rafale fighter plane was indeed Pakistani, but actually shows a Mirage 5 plane that crashed during training exercises three weeks ago. In some cases, video of purported Indian air attacks actually turns out to be footage from a popular video game!
There's an awful lot of fake photos and videos out there on the Internet, particularly in this age of AI. Where a war is involved, everything gets amped up a notch or two further, to the extent that it's pretty hard to trust anything you see online unless it comes directly from a highly reputable source. And even then it pays to be pretty sceptical.
Thus begins another major armed conflict in a time of renewed conflicts across the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment