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Islamabad: Using a phony page of the UK-based The Daily Telegraph, Pakistan’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar has hailed the nation’s air force. As he told the Pakistan Senate on Thursday, “Telegraph writes the Pakistan Air Force is the undisputed king of the skies.” Dar cited a phony newspaper page that went popular on social media.

The iVerify Pakistan team of the Pakistani daily The Dawn looked into the material, discovered inconsistencies in the widely shared image, and concluded that the information was untrue. Using its capabilities, it examined the British publication “The Daily Telegraph” to determine whether any similar news stories had been disseminated.

The image, which purportedly depicts the front page of The Daily Telegraph newspaper announcing the Pakistan Air Force as the “King of the Skies” in the wake of the recent escalation with India, has been circulated by several people on social media since May 10. Dawn noted that the screenshot is phony and that no such story was printed in the newspaper.

Given its virality and the public’s intense interest in the worldwide coverage of the ongoing tensions between India and Pakistan, The Dawn carried out a fact-check to ascertain the accuracy of the allegation made in the newspaper.

The scientists discovered a number of anomalies in the language, misspelled words, and jumped and misspelled phrases when analyzing the popular picture. It is inappropriate to use words like “Fyaw…” in place of “Force,” “preformance” in place of “performance,” “Aur Force” in place of “Air Force,” and “advancemend” in place of “advancement.” According to Dawn, these spelling and typographical errors are not in line with the editorial standards of a major daily.

The page’s design was contrasted with that of The Daily Telegraph’s official edition. The article’s graphic is phony, and the UK-based newspaper hasn’t published any articles like it.

Several voices from Pakistan also repeated the fact check. “How fake news overshadows the truth: Deputy PM & Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar cited this false news, during his speech on the Senate floor, to support claims of PAF’s dominance over India,” wrote journalist Imran Mukhtar of The Nation. The PAF did, without a doubt, dominate, but the aforementioned picture is phony.

Abdul Wasey Naik, another X user, wrote: “This image was shared and quoted by numerous reliable Pakistani journalists throughout the day, who claimed it was the Daily Telegraph’s front page with the headline, ‘Pakistan Air Force: The Undisputed King of the Skies.'” This image was created by AI.
The Pakistani side initiated a disinformation campaign against India when India launched Operation Sindoor on terrorist targets in Pakistan. This demonstrated Pakistan’s frantic effort to deflect attention with a flurry of false information and online drama.

In order to quickly and massively fill the information space with lies, Pakistan’s state-affiliated accounts also used their tried-and-true strategy of reusing old photos, distorting old videos, and making up entirely made-up claims. This made it hard to tell fact from fiction.