ISLAMABAD: A fake news piece has prompted the Defence Minister of Pakistan to threaten to go atomic. Khawaja Muhammad Asif wrote a severe Twitter post directed at Israel after reading a false report saying Israel had threatened Pak with nuclear weapons.
"Israely def min threatens nuclear retaliation presuming pak role in Syria aganist Daesh," he wrote on his Twitter account. "Israel forgets Pakistan is a Nuclear state too," he said. The fake story appeared on a website with a headline that went 'Israeli Defence Minister: If Pakistan send ground troops to Syria on any pretext, we will destroy this country with a nuclear attack', on December 20. It even misidentified the country's defence minister, attributing quotes to a former minister, Moshe Yaalon. Responding to the piece, the Israeli Defence Ministry said the report was fictitious.
"The statement attributed to fmr Def Min Yaalon re Pakistan was never said," it tweeted. The ministry also said, "Reports referred to by the Pakistani Def Min are entirely false." While Asif did not respond to the Israelis, his tweet was reposted almost 400 times, and he was mocked for the mistake. The same website had several fake articles including one that read, "Clinton is staging a military coup against Trump."
The proliferation of fake news stories - spread on social networks and produced by a variety of sources including pranksters, foreign governments and enterprising individuals who hope to receive advertising revenue by driving traffic to their websites - has become an increasingly serious problem. A North Carolina man was arrested on Dec. 4 after firing a gun at a Washington pizza parlour, because investigators said he was investigating claims in fake news articles that the pizzeria was at the center of a child sex slave ring linked to Hillary Clinton.
