When President Donald Trump announced in a social media video on February 28 that the United States and Israel had launched strikes on Iran, he kickstarted a war that has engulfed the Middle East.
But he also sparked an online information war that analysts say has been dominated by the use of AI-generated content to spread fake news about the conflict
One study from Clemson University in South Carolina found that, within 24 hours of the US and Israel launching attacks on Iran, dozens of social media accounts affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had begun posting Iranian propaganda about the war, some of which reached an audience of millions.
Among the most widely viewed content are AI-generated videos mocking Trump – styled to reference Western media including the LEGO movies and the Teletubbies – and AI videos and photographs claiming to show the devastation Iranian strikes have wrought on Israel and the Gulf states.
“The propaganda includes memes and cartoons that aren’t meant to be perceived as real but are very good at spreading political messaging,” said Darren Linvill, author of the study and co-director of Clemson’s Media Forensics Hub.
“The deepfakes portray a version of reality that [seems] genuine and often paint Iran as more successful in the conflict. Both are being shared widely among communities that are critical of the war and hungry for this messaging.”
‘Politically divisive’
The accounts analysed in the Clemson study had been used previously for Iranian influence operations “designed to exploit regional fault lines to advance Iranian regime interests” in the West by posting “politically divisive” content such as critiques of the recent US immigration crackdown.
The switch to posting war propaganda on platforms including X, Instagram and Bluesky suggests that Iran quickly overhauled its social media strategy when the war with the US and Israel began.
As the conflict has spiralled over the past month, Iran has relied on both state media outlets and proxies to push its online message as a form of asymmetrical warfare with a view to targeting a US audience.
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“The Iranian regime wants to make the conflict as painful as possible for the US and Israel, and if they can target what support Trump and [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu have, it may ultimately shorten the war,” Linvill said.
There is fertile ground in the United States for messages critiquing military involvement in the Middle East.
Ipsos polling from mid-March found that US public opinion was “overwhelmingly” against the war in Iran, with 58 percent opposing US military strikes and 78 percent against the idea of US boots on the ground.
In some cases, the Iranian regime does not need to create original or fake content to spread its message.
Clips of the former head of the US National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent, being interviewed about his resignation in opposition to the war were widely shared online by Iranian state media.
‘A ton of lies in a grain of truth’
AI videos in particular “travel fast and plug into emotions that people already have”, said Tine Munk, senior lecturer in criminology at Nottingham Trent University and a specialist in digital warfare.
“They create a lot of noise, even when they are so obviously fake because it is easy to communicate complex ideas through visual storytelling using these shared cultural references,” he said.
But many of the photos and videos gaining traction online purport to show events on the ground that are harder to identify as fake.
Information warfare analyst Tal Hagin has been tracking these on X – a platform where disinformation about the war is rife.
Among them are hundreds of examples of videos and images showing Iranian attacks on Israel that are either years old, of attacks on different countries or are AI-generated.
“There was a strike in Tel Aviv on February 28th, and the videos and photos of those strikes have been used every single day to allegedly depict new strikes,” Hagin said.
The strategy is effective, he added, because the initial attack really did happen. “Then they put a ton of lies into that grain of truth, so people don’t know what the truth is anymore.”
In addition, “social media platforms are not fulfilling their commitments on labelling content and removing it if it is provably false”, said Melanie Smith, expert in information operations at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
“We’re seeing content get millions of views before it’s proven to be AI and labelled as such.”
‘Information battlefield’
The current conflict in the Middle East is not the first time viral videos and memes have been used as a weapon of war – they are an established form of Ukrainian resistance against Russian misinformation.
But the use of AI to generate wartime propaganda is a new development.
“This conflict is the first time we’ve really seen AI-generated content be used very intentionally to sow chaos and confusion around what’s actually happening on the ground,” Smith said.
Adding to the confusion are censorship rules restricting the flow of information out of both Israel and Iran.
In Israel, wartime censors have prohibited the sharing of information deemed sensitive, such as the location of interceptor missiles.
Meanwhile, Iran has imposed a full internet blackout, now in its fourth week, making it extremely difficult for outsiders to know what is happening on the ground.
The result is “a big information void that can be filled very quickly with synthetic content, propaganda narratives and generally chaotic information”, Smith said.
Iran is surging forward on this “information battlefield”, said Munk. “It’s a broader war strategy where Iran cannot always dominate militarily, so it’s focused on shaping perceptions to create doubt and uncertainty.”
Trump has accused Iran of using AI-generated “fake news” as a “disinformation weapon” –although the White House shared its own heavily critiqued AI video combining real footage of strikes in Iran with clips from action movies and video games.
“Iran has been fairly successful, certainly more successful than the US and Israel, in reaching a broad audience and gaining more support than they might otherwise have,” Linvill said.
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