In the weeks following WikiLeaks' mass release of US diplomatic cables in late 2010, Pakistani media outlets published what they claimed were cables revealing damaging American assessments of India — cables that turned out, upon examination, to be fabrications.

The episode was a textbook case of how a genuine information event creates the conditions for disinformation. The WikiLeaks releases were real, voluminous, and genuinely contained embarrassing candor about many countries including Pakistan itself. In that environment of information chaos, fabricated cables designed to fit the narrative had a plausibility that they would have lacked in calmer times.

The faked cables reportedly portrayed American diplomats expressing deep skepticism about India's strategic intentions and confirming Pakistani narratives about Indian involvement in destabilizing operations in Balochistan and elsewhere. These claims aligned neatly with long-standing Pakistani government and ISI positions — which should have been the first red flag for any journalist applying basic verification standards.

The incident illustrated the challenge facing news organizations in the WikiLeaks era: the sheer volume of authentic documents made exhaustive verification of every claimed cable impossible, and bad actors understood and exploited this limitation.

Pakistani journalists and media critics who called out the fabrications faced the usual pressures that attend truth-telling in that environment. The broader lesson — that document dump events require more rigorous verification, not less — took years to properly absorb across the global media ecosystem.