Dozens Are Dead in Kashmir. Online, the Video Can't Be Trusted.
In late July and early August 2026, weeks of election unrest have killed at least 40 people in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, Amnesty International said, as authorities imposed a communications blackout. In the resulting information vacuum, AI-generated and recycled videos of purported shootings have spread across social media, and fact-checkers say the truth has become harder to find.
For weeks this summer, Pakistan-administered Kashmir has been convulsed by deadly protests and a near-total communications blackout — and into that darkness has poured a stream of video that cannot be taken at face value. As a third and final round of a violence-shadowed regional election approached on Aug. 10, some of the most-shared clips purporting to show the crackdown turned out to be old footage from elsewhere, or to have been generated by artificial intelligence, Al Jazeera reported.
Weeks of deadly protest
The unrest has been driven by the Jammu and Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee, or JAAC, a coalition of local politicians, activists and small-business leaders demanding cheaper essentials and changes to electoral law, including the abolition of 12 assembly seats reserved for Kashmiri refugees, Al Jazeera reported. Ahead of the vote, at least 40 people had been killed, including 34 protesters and six police and paramilitary personnel, according to Amnesty International, which cited media reports; local activists have put the toll higher.
Amnesty said security forces used lethal force against demonstrators in the town of Rawalakot on the first day of polling. Its acting regional director for South Asia, Isabelle Lassée, said the reports from Rawalakot were consistent with the Pakistani authorities' long record of unlawful violence against protesters in Jammu and Kashmir, and the group called for a prompt, independent and transparent investigation into the use of force, according to Amnesty International. In June, authorities had designated the JAAC under counterterrorism law, a step Amnesty called a dangerous escalation of the crackdown.
A blackout, and an information vacuum
As the protests spread, roadblocks cut off towns and the government suspended internet and mobile services across the territory, leaving residents in what one dispatch described as a state of collapse, Al Jazeera reported. The region had been under a partial internet blackout since early June, according to figures from the monitoring group NetBlocks cited by Al Jazeera.
The blackout did more than silence the people inside it. With reporters and independent observers largely shut out and residents unable to post reliably, the outside world was left to piece the crisis together from whatever crossed the network's edges — a vacuum that unverified and manufactured footage quickly filled. Amnesty International urged the authorities to restore communications access and let media and monitors into the area, arguing that the blackout was itself compounding the danger to protesters, according to Amnesty International.
Into the void, fabricated video
What spread in place of verified reporting was a mix of the real and the invented. Viral videos and images purported to show staged protester injuries and fabricated police shootings, some of them generated by artificial intelligence, Al Jazeera reported. Fact-checkers confirmed some clips as authentic while debunking others as AI-generated or recycled from earlier, unrelated events, the outlet reported, though many claims remained impossible to verify because of the restricted access and the ongoing blackout.
Some of the recycled material had simply been relabeled. One clip presented as a police clash in Rawalakot was traced back to a protest near the U.S. consulate in Karachi months earlier, recontextualized to fit the new crisis, Al Jazeera reported. With authorities yet to confirm a full death toll and the region sealed off, that mix of authentic, recycled and AI-made footage left an already contested count of the dead harder still to establish, the outlet reported.
Why the fakes travel
The episode fits a pattern researchers have tracked across crises with restricted information: when a verified account of events is cut off, fabricated content moves into the gap, and cheap, convincing AI tools make that content faster to produce and harder to detect. Staggered voting continued under the blackout amid an opposition boycott, with the final round scheduled for Aug. 10, Al Jazeera reported. For the people living through it, the cost is not abstract: with the network down and the feeds full of fakes, neither the outside world nor Kashmiris themselves could be sure what was happening on their own streets.