A fake news story has touched off a Twitter confrontation between nuclear powers Pakistan and Israel, the latest disturbing incident of fabricated stories having a serious impact in the real world.
The exchange of tense public words between two countries with a difficult relationship and no diplomatic ties comes the same month that a fake news story about a child abuse ring prompted a gunman to fire shots inside a pizza restaurant in Washington.
The spat appeared to have been prompted by the publication of a fake story headlined “Israeli Defense Minister: If Pakistan send ground troops to Syria on any pretext, we will destroy this country with a nuclear attack”.
The story appeared on 20 December on the site AWD News, which has been identified by fact-checking organisations as a fake news site.
Snopes, one of five organisations chosen by Facebook to vet questionable stores, said AWD News “doesn’t have more than a nodding acquaintance with facts, instead playing on nationalistic fantasy and conspiracy theory to create alarming … stories.”
The article mis-identified Moshe Ya’alon as the Israeli defence minister when he actually resigned in May, changed the title of a senior official from the Pakistan government and was dotted with grammatical errors and strange syntax.
Undeterred by those warning signs, Pakistan’s defence minister, Khawaja Mohammad Asif, apparently read the article as a genuine threat of a pre-emptive nuclear strike and took to Twitter to warn Israel that “Pakistan is a nuclear state too.”
Israeli def min threatens nuclear retaliation presuming pak role in Syria against Daesh.Israel forgets Pakistan is a Nuclear state too AH
— Khawaja M. Asif (@KhawajaMAsif) December 23, 2016
Israel’s defense ministry responded the next day, also on Twitter, saying the original story was “totally fictitious” and the quote had been invented.
@KhawajaMAsif reports referred to by the Pakistani Def Min are entirely false
— Ministry of Defense (@Israel_MOD) December 24, 2016
After the Twitter spat pushed the story into the spotlight, AWD updated it to identify Ya’alon as a former defence minister in the body of the text, but left the headline unchanged. It continued to mis-identify Tariq Fatemi, special assistant to the Pakistani prime minister, as minister of state for foreign affairs.
There was no immediate reaction from Pakistan to Israel’s response, but Asif did take time to direct an oblique message at the New York Times. After the paper described his own tweet as a “nuclear threat”, Asif insisted that Pakistan’s nuclear programme “is only a deterrence”.
Our nuclear prgrm is only a deterrence to protect our freedom.We desire to coexist in peace , both in our region & beyond.@nytimes
— Khawaja M. Asif (@KhawajaMAsif) December 25, 2016
Pakistan became a nuclear power in 1998. Israel officially neither confirms nor denies the existence of an arsenal, but its nuclear programme has been an open secret since the 1980s.
Their dispute is the latest case of fake news, peddled by sites with political aims or simply to earn money from advertising, influencing the real world.
Concern about real world spillover spiked in early December after a man opened fire in a pizza restaurant in Washington DC after becoming convinced by fake news reports that it was used for child sex abuse.
He claimed he had come to investigate “Pizzagate”, a baseless conspiracy, which falsely claims Clinton and her campaign chief John Podesta were running a child sex ring from the restaurant’s backrooms.
Tech companies have come under increasing pressure to roll out changes to attempt to thwart the trend, which has become a global problem.
Germany’s political mainstream is getting increasingly nervous about the effect that the rise of fake news, hacking and misinformation might have on federal elections next autumn, particularly since the US election. Many in France are also concerned about the possible impact on Presidential elections in the spring.