Iran has radically overhauled its social media strategy in an all-out information war launched by the country’s Islamic rulers in response to US and Israeli military attacks.
Cyber experts say Iranian foreign influence operations have gone into overdrive as part of an “asymmetric” campaign designed to complement its military retaliation and intensify moral pressure on the US and Israel into curtailing their war efforts.
It has meant flooding platforms such as X, Instagram and Bluesky with targeted postings calculated to exploit the war’s unpopularity in the US, including among supporters of Donald Trump.
Previous multi-pronged communications aimed at fomenting support for causes such as Scottish independence and Irish unification have been jettisoned in favour of a single-issue message that has included AI-generated videos and memes mocking Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister.
Some AI generated footage has faked successful strikes on the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, bomb damage supposedly inflicted on buildings in Tel Aviv, and Israeli soldiers supposedly crying in fear over Iranian retaliation.
The Iranian campaign has been sufficiently effective to draw complaints from Trump, who accused Iran of using AI as a “disinformation weapon”.
The intensified onslaught has come as the regime imposed a near-total internet blackout in Iran while threatening punishments against anyone using satellite internet connections, such as Starlink.
Government agents have also reportedly tried to intimidate Iranians living abroad against posting online messages against the regime or in favor the US-Israeli war effort. Expatriate Iranians report receiving phone calls or online warnings that their citizenship will be revoked or family members in Iran harmed unless they stop posting.
Analysts believe the cyber effort has become a central component of the regime’s survival strategy, along with military retaliation against US and allied targets, and closure of the strait of Hormuz.
“It’s absolutely asymmetric warfare,” said Darren Linvill, co-director of the Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub in South Carolina and author of a study into Iran’s tactics.
“The use of artificial intelligence is impressive, and it’s at a rate that I don’t think anybody’s seen before to the same extent or in the same way.
“Iran is using every advantage they had. They had been preparing for this conflict for almost 50 years, and this was part of what they prepared for. They understand the media ecosystem.”
The Clemson study found that Iranian social media efforts previously aimed at exploiting political discord in the UK and US were immediately redirected after the American-Israeli military strikes began on 28 February.
Superficially-authentic troll accounts hitherto focused exclusively on Scottish or Irish politics, or criticising Keir Starmer or the Royal family, instead denounced the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the lethal strike on a school in the Iranian city of Minab that killed up to 175 people, mostly school girls.
The troll accounts, as well as those in the US with Latino identities that primarily posted against Trump’s anti-migration agenda, have since been suspended. They have been replaced by content placed by Iranian proxies and embassies, which experts say is sometimes so effective that it is re-posted numerous times, compounding popular misgivings over an already, deeply unpopular war.
“All their normal operations have been completely upended in order to focus on the war,” said Linvill. “They are very focused on the existential threat that is the ongoing war with Israel and the United States.
“There were accounts run by the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] pretending to be Scottish and Irish and talking about Scottish and Irish politics one day and then exclusively focused the war in Iran and unabashed Iranian propaganda the next.
“To use those same assets to suddenly talk about how the supreme leader is a martyr seems a little inauthentic from a voice that’s supposedly a 20-year-old girl in county Cork.”
A key part of the goal appears to be to harness criticism of the war among Trump’s increasingly disenchanted from Maga (make America great again) allies.
Press TV, Iranian state television’s English language satellite channel, posted four clips from Tucker Carlson’s interview with Joe Kent, who resigned this week as the Trump administration’s counterterrorism adviser, on its social media account within one hour on Thursday.
Iranian propaganda operators would have seized on Kent’s assertion – voiced in his resignation letter and in his interview with Carlson – that Israel led the US into the war, said Alex Goldenberg, an expert on online threats and foreign influence campaigns.
“A core part of the Iranian information model is identifying fault lines in American political debate and amplifying them,” he said. “For years, that meant platforming fringe movements on the left with demonstrable sympathies toward adversarial regimes. What’s significant now is is that Iranian state media has found new and growing supply of content on the right, where rhetoric questioning Israeli influence over American foreign policy is trafficking in overt antisemitism.
“Iran doesn’t need to create that content. It simply presents itself.”
