Social-Media
Fake News is a part of Indian 5th Generation warfare, and it needs stronger deterrence, according to the #CivilWarinPakistan trend.
When the latest anti-government protests reached their height on Sunday, many doctored photos and misrepresented videos started to be tweeted as part of the hashtag #CivilWarinPakistan, which quickly rose to the top of Twitter's trending topics. The pattern indicated that Pakistan was in the midst of a war, and that members of the armed forces were resigning and going rogue. It was intended to exacerbate the unrest by adding fuel to the fire and inciting more abuse. The highly advanced mass propaganda and misinformation strategy exhibited many of the hallmarks of state-sponsored 5th generation warfare, as the ISPR had warned us. Yet, have we done enough to make a difference?
Still, have we done enough to keep it under control and minimize the dangers it poses?
As part of the recent protest, a 6-month-old video of a funeral procession in Lahore was seen.
Let's get back POK & Sindh!
— Nayan Taori (@nayantaori) April 14, 2021
Civil War situation in Pakistan!
People on Roads, against the Army & the Selected Government!#CivilWarinPakistan #COVIDEmergency pic.twitter.com/9RL7hxhasN
An unnamed video of a Pakistan army soldier was later revealed to be fake
Another Pakistani soldier speaks as #LahoreBurning #CivilWarinPakistanpic.twitter.com/ZlhDd0CMCv
— PakNewsUpdates (@PakNews2021) April 18, 2021
The hashtag #CivilWarinPakistan was started by an Indian Twitter account, @Gif baaz, at 2:00 PM, according to renowned journalist Makhdoom Shahab Uddin, and the majority of the Twitter accounts' locations could be traced to Indian cities such as Pune, New Delhi, and Mumbai. Both army staff recordings
However, the involvement of political party employees in these developments exacerbated the issue.
5th generation warfare, also known as hybrid warfare, is a military strategy that combines political warfare with traditional, irregular, and cyberwarfare, as well as other manipulating strategies like false news/disinformation campaigns and diplomacy. It has primarily been used to describe Indian attempts to destabilize Pakistan by weaponizing mass media, including television networks, print media, and social media, in order to manipulate Pakistan's politico-religious fault lines. Pakistan's top security forces have repeatedly described it as a major challenge.
Another senior journalist and anchor reported that Indian forces had infiltrated the protesting party's workers' WhatsApp groups and were inciting law enforcement agencies to abuse. According to him, the network's miscreants had been tracked down, and those who instigated the demonstrations were likely to be arrested.
Director-General of Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) Major General Babar Iftikhar had declared that India is subjecting Pakistan to a massive campaign of fifth-generation warfare to inhibit the country’s success and tarnish its international image.
“Unfortunately, it’s a major onslaught, it’s a major part of the fifth-generation warfare. Pakistan is being subjected to […] hybrid applications massively and we are aware of that,” the ISPR director-general said. “Be it fake news spread by Indian sources of a ‘civil war’ in Pakistan or the propaganda being carried out against the nation on various social media platforms, the reality of our time is that this kind of warfare – aptly termed fifth-generation warfare – shapes our international relations significantly.”
