War of Words between India and Pakistan: A Computational Linguistic Analysis of Social Media Content

Abstract

The digital world has revolutionized war, and it is no longer fought only on the physical borders but also on social media battlegrounds. The contentious history of India and Pakistan has extended their rivalry to social media. The current study examines the war of words between India and Pakistan, and, for this purpose, the researchers have selected the ten most-followed politicians, journalists and five military or defense force Twitter/X accounts. The raw dataset of 213707 tweets has been extracted from January 2023 to August 2025, which was later filtered using a list of 807 India-Pakistan conflict-related keywords pertinent to cross-border disputes, yielding a clean dataset of 63239. The researchers have manually labelled 800 tweets as propaganda or non-propaganda in light of Jacques Ellul’s 18-techniques propaganda framework to train the DeBERTaV3-Large model for analysis. The study’s findings have revealed that propaganda is a dominant feature of daily communication rather than an exceptional practice, as nearly half of tweets are propagandistic. The highest rate of war-like propaganda is in the tweets of the army/defense forces (75.47%), followed by journalists (61.18%), and politicians (38.81%). However, the cross-national difference is highly profession-based. The findings have revealed that the Indian army exhibits the highest rate of propaganda at 78.41%, followed by Indian journalists (65.64%) and politicians (35.06%). Moreover, the Pakistani journalists have shown the highest level of propaganda at 57.78%, followed by politicians at 51.76%, and military/defense forces (50%). Overall, the Indian army and journalists are found to be more aggressive, warmonger and propagandistic in their tweets as compared to their Pakistani counterparts. In short, the study provides empirical evidence that the conflict between India and Pakistan has shifted to the digital domain, and propaganda plays a crucial role in shaping narratives and public opinion.