As digital content becomes ammunition, the world faces a critical challenge: to restore information. No longer confined to diplomacy or defense strategy, today’s power struggles are fought in the realm of perception — through deepfakes and manipulated media.
In today’s war-torn world, images and videos don’t just go viral, they explode. Like digital bombs, they scatter shards of truth, half-truths, and outright falsehoods across borders, screens, and minds. We are living in an age where one deepfake can shatter diplomatic trust, one AI-generated image can incite unrest, and one viral headline can sabotage years of negotiation. When misinformation and fake news enter this roster of weaponry, the tragedy is compounded. What could have been a moment of resilience turns into a spectacle of doubt and chaos.
The recent escalations in the Indian subcontinent stand as a burning example of this. As tensions rose, misinformation surged; fabricated visuals, misattributed videos, and misleading narratives flooded social media. But what stood out was the Indian government’s prompt and proactive response: deploying fact-check units, engaging official handles, and taking down false content in real-time. It wasn’t just governance; it was communication warfare.
Strategic communication in today’s geopolitical space has become a battlefield of contending ideas, contrasting perceptions, diverse strategies and complex narratives.
In 2025, the framework of the geopolitical landscape has been affected by the geostrategic communication architecture. The entire ecosystem has become a “Bitter Platform of pulls and pressure” a “Tug of War” and “Slanging Match” being played out on different media formats by stakeholders whose image is at stake. The moot question is whether geostrategic communication requires overriding restraints to focus on limits of misuse of content through deepfakes, AI-generated images, falsehood promotion and trigger-generated perception and response.
Recent events have shown that the geopolitical space is on a “24×7 Communication Alert”. The buzz thereby generated has influenced the contours of the core diplomatic interface and messaging structure. It has also sent warning signals that wrap around “Communication Disorder”, misinformation and hyped ecosystem content. The entire communication operation is not a messaging tool, rather it is being positioned as a strategic weapon to misguide and negatively align thereby disturbing the “Information Equilibrium and Discourse”.
In the good old days, geopolitics was dominated by conventional tools and channels of dissemination, bilateral interface and personal diplomacy interference to counter negative narratives, perceptions and sentiments. Today, the conventional wisdom has been overtaken by “Communication Strikes” which thrive on utilising the space to destabilise, manipulate and churn unwanted crises, narratives and unending falsehoods in an era of instant communication. Policymakers and strategists grapple with the matrix of complex “Communication Intersections” where ground rules are not constant and thrive on fakery and “Communication Escalation” points. Any crisis that impacts geopolitics today thrives on communication disorder, imbalance and asymmetry.
The lack of understanding to dissect the negative content amongst the audiences leads to being prey to biased hostile reporting. This has been one of the biggest obstacles to transparency in communicating the right message through the appropriate medium.
Fact-checking units have become the new normal of the global order. Image depiction and messaging consistency within the diplomatic landscape have suffered pitfalls due to a lack of reciprocity in outlining events, issues and themes.
The Indian subcontinent witnessed this first-hand. As tension escalated, certain media outlets and social platforms were flooded with images and videos purportedly from conflict zones. Many of these were from unrelated incidents or were digitally manipulated to incite public panic. However, Indian authorities acted swiftly: real-time fact-checking, dissemination of verified updates, and coordinated efforts with social media platforms helped curb the impact. The government of India’s Fact Check Unit PIB, under the aegis of the I&B Ministry, played a critical role in stalling the flow of disinformation that flooded the social media space in the recent events of neighbourhood tension.
The result? Temporary restoration of the information order in a region otherwise on the brink of digital chaos. The need for a new global information order is acute and arises on account of the gaps and fissures that appear in the messaging and perception terrain.
Due to the deep impact of social media, every medium and tool within the geostrategic space is suffering from “Asymmetrical Dynamics”. Dynamics related to information overload, overhype infodemics, lack of credibility and the growing role and interplay of non-state elements in the ecosystem.
The need today is to use communication not as an adjunct to a strategy and policy, but rather utilise the platform to build trust, confidence, self-belief and transparency and “Positioning Communication Perspective”. The problem is that the institutional structures that govern the ecosystem thrive on the “Imbalances Related to Resources, Reach, Accountability and Non-Regulation” of the mediums. It is no rocket science when one notices the biased projection of the Western media on issues that create ripples in the image, perception and narratives. These structures do not facilitate a fair discourse of narratives rather they suffer from communication distortion due to their mantra of knee-jerk communication.
Globally, geostrategic practitioners have suffered the menace of fact-checking, to ensure fairness and ethics in information management. This unwanted phenomenon has also thrived due to the lack of “Media literacy” and awareness amongst people, and the inability to critically understand and evaluate content.
This phenomenon is one of the biggest push factors ailing the current global information order and has led to distortion and lack of understanding of key issues dominating the media space.
In the current global order, geostrategic considerations are certainly playing out in the public domain, rather than in hush-hush corridors of power. Policymakers face the challenge of gestures, curated visuals, amplified images, and digital tools. Invasion that erases trust, cohesion and transparency in the information ecosystem.
Geostrategy, today requires a holistic narrative-building exercise wherein traditional and new media formats weave together a predictable and comprehensive narrative. It is a critical factor that must be to weave and check the role and responsibility of AI.
Technology-driven communication, that does not obliterate transparency and ethics in the domain of strategic messaging. Global consensuses should not fall prey to the wonder tools and algorithms of AI as it would expose the inbuilt fragility of communication through modern tools techniques and content.
What the world needs now is a globally accepted fact-checking protocol; a cooperative network of governments, tech platforms, and neutral watchdogs committed to immediate and effective debunking of misinformation.
It must be matched with international investments in media literacy initiatives and cross-border transparency frameworks. In these volatile times, when geopolitics is dictated by optics and perception, the cost of unchecked misinformation is far too high. Strategic communication must be wielded not as a megaphone for chaos, but as a lighthouse of clarity and trust because the war for truth is no less important than the war for peace.
(The writer is former civil servant writes on Cinema and Strategic Communication. Inputs provided by Zoya Ahmad and Vaishnavi Srinivasan. Views expressed are personal)