Viral claim about an official advisory to turn off mobile phone location services to evade drone strikes is fake
Amid rising tensions between India and Pakistan, a viral graphic (here, here, here and here) is being circulated on social media claiming that faculty members from an unnamed college or institution have issued an ‘official advisory’ via email, asking people (students) to turn off location services on their phones to avoid being detected by drones. This graphic is being shared by social media users urging people to stay alert. The message in the viral graphic reads ‘ATTENTION Hello everyone, We’ve received an official email from the faculty with an important advisory: please turn off the location services on your phones immediately. It has been brought to our attention that drones are being used to detect areas with high Population.’ We will fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: This graphic shows an official advisory asking citizens to turn off location services on their phones to avoid detection of areas with high population by drones.
Fact: The Government of India has dismissed this claim, calling it fake. On 9 May 2025, the government issued a clarification through its official fact-checking unit, PIB Fact Check, stating that no such advisory has been issued by the Government. The claim is False.
To check the authenticity of the advisory, we ran a keyword search to verify whether any official announcement or directive had been issued by the Government of India (here, here, here, and here). No such advisory was found on any government department or institution website.
The viral graphic appears to have first been posted (now deleted) by an Instagram page named indiainlast24hr with the caption “Stay alert.” We reached out to the page to confirm details such as which college allegedly issued this advisory, but received no response. The post has since been deleted. We will update this article as soon as we receive a response from them.
We then found that the Government of India’s fact-checking unit, PIB Fact Check, addressed the viral claim in a post on X (formerly Twitter) on 9 May 2025, stating that no such advisory has been issued and that the claim is fake.
On 08 May 2025, PIB released a broader warning advising the public to be cautious of Pakistan-sponsored propaganda on social media. They urged citizens to verify every piece of information carefully. They asked the citizens to report any dubious content related to the Indian armed forces and the ongoing situation to PIB Fact Check and shared their contact details (WhatsApp: +91 8799711259, Email: factcheck@pib.gov.in).
To sum up, the viral claim about an official advisory asking people to turn off location services to evade drone detection is false. The government has not issued any such advisory.