As part of my ongoing analysis on the campaign of weaponised misinformation being waged against Pakistan. I have decided to make my life easier and use the Phalgam "misinformation" playbook as a foundation for future predictive analysis it follows the same pattern:
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Analysis based on top 70 posts on each platform with the following hashtags:
- “Pahalgam”, “Pahalgam attack”, “Pahalgam terror”, “Operation Sindoor”
- “Pakistan attack India”, “Pakistan blamed”, “terror attack Kashmir”
Interesting we are seeing a re-use same hashtags and keywords now on Social media when it comes to narrative building against Pakistan.
Tracking of high-influence accounts on Indian side, I examined three key metrics:
- Volume of mentions (hourly/daily) by country origin
- Sentiment (negative/anger vs neutral vs supportive) over time
- Share of misinformation (percent of high-engagement posts flagged by fact-checkers)
As of late September to early October 2025 the re-use of the Hashtag #Operation Sindoor and #Pakistan Azaad Kashmir has seen increased use in Indian Social Media when presenting misinformation. A scrape was conducted to determine the platform and distribution of the mention "Pakistan" "Pakistan Azaad Kashmir" "Operation Sindoor" for the period October 1 to October 9th.
The methodology: Sample of 1,200 high-visibility public posts across X and Instagram
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At this point the calculations got a little hard for me to manage on my own and I had to resort to asking Uncle AI for help.
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X (Twitter): visible trending topic pages and many high-reach tweets on spike days (Oct 2–6, Oct 8–10) indicate
tens to low-hundreds of thousands of tweets mentioning “Pakistan” or the hashtags during heavily-active days.
Conservative public multiplier (sample → platform total estimate):
X public mentions (India origin) ≈
180k — 600k for October.
In the above sample - the
negative-sentiment share (explicit hostility, insults, calls for retaliation, accusations) averaged
48%.
On X alone X the visible trending topic pages and many high-reach tweets on spike days (Oct 2–6, Oct 8–10) indicate
tens to low-hundreds of thousands of tweets mentioning “Pakistan” or the hashtags
"Pakistan Azaad Kashmir" & "Operation Sindoor" during heavily-active days. Conservative public multiplier (sample → platform total estimate):
X public mentions (India origin) ≈
180k — 600k for October. [
Thank you AI <3]
Key Evidence of sentiment Indicators:
- Oct 2–4, 2025: large spike tied to "Pakistan Azaad Kashmir" protests and rapid media coverage; many X posts and Instagram reels went viral (news embeds from IndiaToday, Times of India, TimesNow reels).
- Oct 7–9, 2025: spikes due to IAF remarks / Operation Sindoor follow-on coverage and IAF Day events featuring Operation Sindoor references; multiple high-reach X threads and YouTube compilations drove comment volumes.
- Persistent: the conversation stayed elevated (analysis pieces, opinion pieces, recurrent reels).
Majority of accounts driving conversations and negative sentiment trends were "influencer" accounts:
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Today witnessed the greatest spike in negative-sentiment across social media platforms scraped:
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This corelates with the data provided by Google Trends for the same search parameters
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In addition to the misinformation peddlers we are aware of, using Recorded Future/Insikt, ISD data I was able to obtain the key influencer accounts "flagged" for misinformation by Factchecking services - I have provided a list below:
View attachment 152649
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Takeaways from this brief analysis:
1. As PDF is used by local and overseas Pakistanis it is important we fact-check any information shared here even by seemingly innocent or authentic accounts
2. Possible create a thread to function as a repository if misinformation/fake-news peddlers
3. Educate members and wider community to the risks of weaponised misinformation and national-security in a highly charged atmosphere.
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TLDR: There is a rise of negative-sentiment and jingoistic posts surrounding Kashmir, Pakistan, India and "Operation Sindoor". People lie on the internet, not surprisingly a high number of Indian accounts on X posting about the conflict including journalists and "influencers" are peddling lies - this includes some Pakistani accounts - please fact-check!