Twitter Thread: How India Peddles Fake News internationally

India has a long history of spreading fake news against Pakistan on international platforms. Just last year, India backed a fake news network, spread across 119 countries, to undermine Pakistan within the European Union and the United Nations, and was exposed by EU DisinfoLab.

In a Twitter thread by the Executive Director of Islamabad Policy Research Institute (IPRI) , Hussain Nadim, exposed how a fake news is turned into an international news by India.

Hussain Nadim tweeted a screenshot of an Indian journalist, Geeta Mohan, who tweeted that the SAARC foreign ministers’ meet has been cancelled after Pakistan wanted Taliban participation. He wrote that such news is first tweeted as breaking news and attributed to sources ‘that can of course never be verified.’

Here is how the Indian Fake News Industry processes a fake news into an international news:

Step 1: Tweet a #fakenews as #Breaking attributing it to “sources” that can of course never be verified. pic.twitter.com/zPrJuQ27Gy

— Hussain Nadim (@HNadim87) September 22, 2021

The next step is to cover the news as a major national story in all of Indian’s top media outlets. After the news is picked up by all the major Indian publications, it is then published through credible journalists.

The executive director of IPRI shared a screenshot of Barkha Dutt’s tweet mentioning the news regarding the SAARC foreign ministers’ meeting with her article for the Washington Post.

Step 3: Go international and publish the fake news through credible journalists. pic.twitter.com/ev4Jdh9r23

— Hussain Nadim (@HNadim87) September 22, 2021

The final step is to ‘push the story to Western policy makers.’ “Under the cover of largest democracy & secular state, India for decades have fed the Western powers with disinformation as exposed by EU DisinfoLab and G5 Internet Observatory,” he wrote.

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