India’s Hindu Extremists Are Trolling the Israel Conflict
Shortly after midnight on October 8, Mohammed Zubair, a fact-checking journalist based in Bangalore, came across a video on X (formerly Twitter). Less than a day had elapsed since the Hamas attacks in Israel, but the caption on the post claimed that Palestinians had shot down four Israeli helicopters in Gaza. Zubair had seen similar footage dozens of times before—from the simulation video game Arma 3, passed off as visuals from the Ukraine war.
Zubair lives in close quarters with his parents, wife, and children; his only time for solitary concentration is when his kids are asleep. As part of his daily work routine, he scours the internet for fake news and propaganda for an hour after midnight. To him, October 8 felt different: The deluge of disinformation he spotted on Indian social media left him stunned. “The scale of misinformation this time was horrific and unimaginable,” Zubair told me.
A grim of a beheading by a Mexican drug cartel of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his son, taken before the latter departed for his military service, was portrayed as the leader sending his offspring to war. of a funeral staged in Jordan to evade a pandemic lockdown was misrepresented as Palestinians faking deaths in Gaza. A 2014 of the Islamic State destroying a mosque in Syria was labeled as the Israeli bombing of a Palestinian mosque.
