#FactCheck -Viral Claim of Alcohol Ban in West Bengal by Amit Shah Is Fake, No Such Announcement Made

Introduction‍

In a significant step, the Indian Army beefed up its information warfare capacity on June 25, 2026, with the operationalisation of @MythbusterXX, its dedicated fact-checking handle designed to counter any form of misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, and deepfakes on the army swiftly. Adopting the motto 'Verify Before You Amplify,' the service seeks to pivot from reactive statements to active cognitive warfare. In a milieu where manipulated narratives can be as decisive in shaping public perception as kinetic force is on the battlefield, truth itself has transformed into a critical national security objective. 

This is clear proof that protecting India’s digital battleground will from now on be defined not just by troop deployments but also by its institutional verification capacities, swift attribution mechanisms, and public awareness.

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When the Battlefield Went Digital‍

Today warfare extends to timelines, group chats, and prime-time graphics packages. The distinction between misinformation , disinformation , and malinformation is crucial to operations. After all, they necessitate different types of counters. Generative AI just exponentially increased their velocity, cost, and the creepy believability of synthesized audio, video, and images. Operation Sindoor, India's May 2025 military response to a Pahalgam terror attack, provides a blueprint for just how large it can get.

According to the fact-checking site BOOM, 68% of fact checks in May related to Operation Sindoor, describing the campaign as a misinformation superspreader, and, more directly, India's Chief of Defence Staff General Anil Chauhan lamented at last year’s Shangri-La Dialogue that roughly 15% of his military’s operational time was spent on countering false news. New Delhi matched this response level; the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting had blocked over 1,400 URLs, many bearing false information or communally inciteful narratives from accounts in Pakistan. These challenges won't be vanishing any time soon. Microsoft's July 2025 Digital Defence Report lists India among the top countries targeted for AI-powered state-backed hacking, noting the automation of attacks and generation of fake content used to influence opinion.

CyberPeace's regulatory tracking also indicates steps toward building infrastructure to mitigate this,  a Rule 7 complaint system for deepfakes, and efforts to foster local detection capabilities under the IndiaAI mission signal it's now an infrastructural threat.

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Why the Army Chose to Speak First

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On 1 June 2026, the Indian government’s official fact-checking unit debunked a deepfake of former Army Chief General Dhiraj Seth talking about India’s engagement with the Taliban that emanated from Pakistan-affiliated propaganda sources, appearing within days of a change of military command. Barely days after General Dhiraj Seth was elevated to Chief of Army Staff, the 31st person to hold the post, another fabricated deepfake used spliced authentic footage with AI-cloned audio to falsely allege he had blamed the past army leadership for hiding the bodies of soldiers to protect their image.

Such a dual targeting of India’s army chiefs with deepfakes in such close succession is a testament as to why an authoritative, constantly running fact-check machine isn’t an optional extra but a strategic must-have.

Architecture is as important as architecture itself. India tried a statutory fact-checking model with a government-owned Fact Check Unit under the Information Technology (IT) Rules of 2023 through the Press Information Bureau (PIB). It had to retreat from the edge of the constitutional cliff. In September 2024, when the Bombay High Court struck down key provisions of these rules. It ruled it unconstitutional to empower the state to declare digital content relating to the state itself as fake, false, or misleading. A similar reading of the analysis by CyberPeace found that digital speech should be given the same protections as offline speech, and this should be the benchmark for any counter-misinformation policy.

MythbusterXX carefully avoids the constitutional controversy by acting as an institutional avenue that produces verified information and rebuttals in response to disinformation. There is a profound distinction between answering falsehoods with factual, credible speech versus shutting them down with state power, the very proportionality that civil libertarians have said must govern a democracy's approach to online misinformation.

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Platforms as Accelerants, Not Just Conduits

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Part of the issue lies upstream, with the algorithms and broadcasters that favor speedy falsehood over careful confirmation. A month’s supply of “false and misleading stories,” the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism observed, streamed online within hours of Operation Sindoor's onset: one fact-checker identified approximately seventy false claims by the close of day one. Meanwhile, on the small screen, graphics depicting escalating conflicts were being televised, with broadcasters forced to scramble under 24/7 competition.

Amplified manipulation of the crisis narrative is also a factor; studies show that thousands of accounts have been reposting exactly the same party content for three years, making crisis-induced viral narratives predictable rather than organic phenomena. For the most part, the platforms that manage these narratives and the algorithms that direct content on both sides of the divide are not just innocent delivery systems.

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Digital Literacy as the First Line of Defence

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Institutional rebuttals only go so far if citizens lack the reflex to pause before sharing, which is where CyberPeace's own work becomes directly relevant. Through a multi-year, Google.org-backed initiative, CyberPeace Foundation aims to reach over 40 million Indian internet users, including 9 million underserved beneficiaries, through a multilingual resource centre offering 650 hours of content, state-level helplines, and quick-response teams staffed by digital forensics and fact-checking experts. Longer-running efforts such as the Digital Shakti campaign and the annual eRaksha competition, run with NCERT, have built a culture of responsible digital citizenship among young and first-time internet users since 2019, while CyberPeace Corps, the foundation's volunteer arm, carries the same message into classrooms and campuses through cyber-awareness sessions run with universities and school networks nationwide. Notably, CyberPeace's own research on children's online safety had already flagged manipulated Army-related videos as a category of digital manipulation designed to cast doubt on official military positions, well before @MythbusterXX existed. The Army's tagline and CyberPeace's mission converge on the same insight: verification is a civic skill, not merely an institutional service.

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A Season of Deepfakes

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The history book of compromised defence material in the past year alone would be edifying. The International Federation of Journalists recorded one such deepfake widely circulated that relied on AI voice cloning and lip-sync tools to present the Pakistani PM conceding defeat, though the video actually contained his praise for the Pakistani air force’s performance following Operation Sindoor. 

Other similar videos featured the Indian Prime Minister, External Affairs Minister, and Home Minister allegedly apologising to Pakistan and a deepfake with a foreign head of state in voice-cloned style applauding India’s armed forces. None needed a state’s resources, but just a laptop, voice cloning available readily, and a citizenry ready to spread rather than confirm the authenticity of any such sensational information before spreading it on to the masses.

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Building the Verification Reflex

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A resilient information ecosystem needs different actors playing complementary roles:

1. Citizens: Do not equate virality with credibility. Verify all national security-related information through official sources, such as @MythbusterXX, before reposting or forwarding it.
2. Journalists: Apply rigorous verification standards to live broadcasts, war-room graphics, and breaking reports, just as you would to print journalism, and avoid speculation during fast-moving military operations.
3. Researchers and fact-checkers: Use open-source forensic and AI-detection technologies to authenticate questionable material. BOOM researchers, for instance, used Deepfake-o-meter to scrutinize misleading videos of political leaders before fact-checking and publishing them.
4. Policymakers: Favored constitutionally proportional and carefully tailored regulations over broad-based takedown mandates. While the 2026 IT Amendment Rules require platforms to shift their obligations from compliance with takedowns towards preventive diligence on synthetic media, implementation should continue to be informed by judicial protections afforded to freedom of speech and due process.

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Cyber Resilience Is National Security Now

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Legal scholars examining Operation Sindoor have drawn a useful distinction between coordinated information warfare, which is strategic and intentional, and the diffuse, uncoordinated mis/disinformation that dominated timelines during the conflict, cautioning that disproportionate state responses to the latter can compromise citizens' right to know just as much as the falsehoods themselves. Getting that balance right, between speed and due process, between institutional voice and censorship, is the real test facing India's information ecosystem, in defence and far beyond it. CyberPeace has made a related argument in its own work on AI-enabled espionage: institutions such as the National Critical Information Infrastructure Protection Centre and the Defence Cyber Agency are already folding AI-based monitoring into their processes, yet no amount of institutional surveillance substitutes for a citizenry trained to spot manipulation on sight.

@MythbusterXX will not end deepfakes, and no single handle can. But it signals something CyberPeace has argued for years: resilience against synthetic and manipulated media requires authoritative institutional voices, digitally literate citizens, forensically equipped researchers, and proportionate policy, all pulling in the same direction. "Verify before you amplify" is not just an Army campaign. It is the operating discipline a democracy needs to protect its own information age.

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Conclusion

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@MythbusterXX can't possibly kill deepfakes and disinformation, but this marks a milestone shift towards developing an institutional resilience for India's info battlefield. For, after all, national security in the age of info warfare depends less on tech and more on robust institutions, constitutional balance in policymaking, responsible social platforms, and a citizenry that clicks "forward" only after clicking "verify."

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This piece is part of CyberPeace's ongoing work on misinformation, disinformation, and digital citizenship in India. For more on CyberPeace's initiatives in digital literacy and cyber resilience, visit cyberpeace.org.

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Key Sources

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• Dynamite News, "Indian Army launches fact-check push against deepfake videos and fake military claims" (June 2026)
• ADG PI – Indian Army, official announcement on X (@adgpi)
• Press Information Bureau, Government of India, press release on countering misinformation during Operation Sindoor
• Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, "Truth is the casualty: How Indian fact-checkers debunked false claims during the India-Pakistan crisis"
• International Federation of Journalists, "AI, Deepfakes, and the Fog of War" and "Operation Sindoor and the Two Wars" (June 2025)
• Republic World, "Operation Sindoor Haunts Pakistan: Islamabad's Latest AI Deepfake Bid Against Indian Army Chief General Dhiraj Seth Exposed" (July 2026)
• TechPolicy Press, "Sanity Prevails as Bombay High Court Strikes Down India Government's Fact Check Unit", and LiveLaw, coverage of the tie-breaker verdict, on the IT Amendment Rules, 2023 (Fact-Check Unit)
• Dark Reading, "Indian Army Propaganda Spread by 1.4K AI-Powered Social Media Accounts"
• Inforrm, "(Dis)information warfare and the right to know: lessons from Operation Sindoor"
• CyberPeace Foundation, initiatives page and The CyberPeace Initiative (Google.org-backed digital literacy programme)
• CyberPeace Foundation, "AI-Powered Espionage: How India's Cybersecurity Strategy Must Evolve"
• CyberPeace Foundation, "From Deepfakes to Due Diligence – Decoding India's IT Amendment Rules"
• Wikipedia, CyberPeace Foundation (background on Digital Shakti and eRaksha)

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A photo circulating on social media claims to show Indian cricketer Mohammed Siraj offering namaz during net practice, while teammates Rohit Sharma, Virat Kohli and Shubman Gill are seen taking a selfie with him. Several users are sharing the image as a “beautiful moment,” portraying it as a symbol of faith, unity and sportsmanship. However, research by the Cyber Peace Foundation has found that the viral image is not genuine and has been AI-generated.

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Claim

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On January 14, 2026, multiple Facebook users shared the viral image with captions describing it as a touching scene from Rajkot’s Saurashtra Stadium. The posts claim that Mohammed Siraj took time out during net practice to offer prayers, reflecting his strong faith, while fellow cricketers Rohit Sharma, Virat Kohli and Shubman Gill respectfully captured the moment on camera.

Users praised the image as a rare blend of spirituality, discipline, teamwork and mutual respect, calling it a “beautiful confluence of sport and faith.”(Links to the post, archived version and screenshots are provided below.)

• https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=4437845333095160&set=a.1510003369212719 

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Fact Check:

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On closely examining the viral image, several visual inconsistencies and unnatural elements were observed, raising suspicion that the picture may not be authentic.To verify this, the Cyber Peace Foundation analysed the image using the AI detection tool Hive Moderation. According to the tool’s assessment, the image showed a 99% likelihood of being AI-generated.

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To further strengthen the verification, the image was also scanned using another AI detection platform, Sightengine. The results indicated a 96% probability that the image was generated using artificial intelligence.

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Conclusion:

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The research confirms that the viral image claiming to show Mohammed Siraj offering namaz during net practice, with Rohit Sharma, Virat Kohli and Shubman Gill taking a selfie, is not real.The photograph has been created using AI tools and falsely shared on social media, misleading users by presenting a fabricated scene as an authentic moment.

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Introduction

The whole world is shifting towards a cashless economy, with innovative payment transaction systems such as UPI payments, card payments, etc. These payment systems require processing, storage, and movement of millions of cardholders data which is crucial for any successful transaction.

And therefore to maintain the credibility of this payment ecosystem, security or secure movement and processing of cardholders data becomes paramount. Entities involved in a payment ecosystem are responsible for the security of cardholders data. Security is also important because if breaches happen in cardholders data it would amount to financial loss. Fraudsters are attempting smart ways to leverage any kind of security loopholes in the payment system.

So these entities which are involved in the payment ecosystem need to maintain some security standards set by one council of network providers in the payment industry popularly known as the Payment Card Industry Security Standard Council.

Overview of what is PCI and PCI DSS Compliance

Earlier every network providers in the payment industry have their own set of security standards but later they all together i.e., Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, and JCB constituted an independent body to come up with comprehensive security standards like PCI DSS, PA DSS, PCI-PTS, etc.  And these network providers ensure the enforcement of the security standards by putting conditions on services being provided to the merchant or acquirer bank.

In other words, PCI DSS particularly is the global standard that provides a baseline of technical and operational requirements designed to protect account data. PCI DSS is a security standard specially designed for merchants and service providers in the payment ecosystem to protect the cardholders data against any fraud or theft.

It applies to all the entities including third-party vendors which are involved in processing storing and transmitting cardholders data. In organization, even all CDE (Card Holder Data Environment) including system components or network component that stores and process cardholders data, has to comply with all the requirements of PCI compliance.  Recently PCI has released a new version of PCI DSS v4.0 a few months ago with certain changes from the previous version after three years of the review cycle.

12 Requirements of PCI DSS

This is the most important part of PCI DSS as following these requirements can make any organization to some extent PCI compliant. So what are these requirements:

• Installing firewalls or maintaining security controls in the networks
• Use strong password in order to secure the CDE( Card holders data environment)
• Protection of cardholder data
• Encrypting the cardholder data during transmission over an open and public network.
• Timely detection and protection of the cardholders data environment from any malicious activity or software.
• Regular updating the software thereby maintaining a secure system.
• Rule of business need to know should apply to access the cardholders data
• Identification and authentication of the user are important to access the system components.
• Physical access to cardholders data should be restricted.
• Monitoring or screening of system components to know the malicious activity internally in real-time.
• Regular auditing of security control and finding any vulnerabilities available in the systems.
• Make policies and programs accordingly in order to support information security.

How organization can become PCI compliant

• Scope: First step is to determine all the system components or networks storing and processing cardholders data i.e., Cardholders Data Environment.
• Assess: Then test whether these systems or networks are complying with all the requirements of PCI DSS COMPLIANCE.
• Report: Documenting all the assessment through self assessment questionnaire by answering following questions like whether the requirements are met or not? Whether the requirements are met with customized approach.
• Attest: Then the next step is to complete the attestation process available on the website of PCI SSC.
• Submit: Then organization can submit all the documents including reports and other supporting documents if it is requested by other entities such as payment brands, merchant or acquirer.
• Remediate: Then the organisation should take remedial action for the requirements which are not in place on the system components or networks.

Conclusion

One of the most important issues facing those involved in the digital payment ecosystem is cybersecurity. The likelihood of being exposed to cybersecurity hazards including online fraud, information theft, and virus assaults is rising as more and more users prefer using digital payments.

And thus complying and adopting with these security standards is the need of the hour. And moreover RBI has also mandated all the regulated entities ( NBFCs Banks etc) under one recent notification to comply with these standards.