WASHINGTON — Iranian government-aligned media outlets and covert online networks have stepped up a coordinated information campaign intended to undercut public support for prospective U.S. or Israeli strikes, according to Western intelligence officials and private cybersecurity analysts.
In briefings to lawmakers this week, two senior U.S. officials said English-language social accounts traced to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) have quadrupled their output since Hamas’s 2025 attack on Israel, mirroring battlefield developments with near-real-time video, memes and AI-generated “news clips.” “It is an asymmetrical strategy: Tehran cannot match American firepower, but it can try to erode Washington’s political will,” one official told reporters on condition of anonymity.
The campaign spans overt broadcasters such as Press TV and covert persona clusters seeded across Facebook, X and Telegram. Meta said in January it dismantled 2,800 Facebook and Instagram profiles that posed as Western activists while pushing anti-U.S. narratives. Cybersecurity firm Mandiant separately documented deep-fake videos in which fabricated Israeli officials appear to confess to war crimes. “Generative AI has lowered both the cost and the linguistic barrier,” Mandiant senior analyst Lian Romero said.
While Iranian information operations are not new, their scale has grown alongside mounting regional violence. Budget documents examined by The New York Times show Tehran raised foreign-language broadcasting allocations to roughly $150 million this fiscal year, a 35 percent jump from 2024.
The U.S. has begun to push back. U.S. Cyber Command confirmed last week it had disabled several Iran-based servers spreading false casualty figures after a March 12 Israeli airstrike near Isfahan. Britain’s Foreign Office is considering fresh sanctions on IRGC-linked tech firms accused of operating bot farms.
Iran denies centrally directing the content. “Western governments label any critical voice as ‘Iranian disinformation’ to justify censorship,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanaani told state media. Digital rights groups caution against overreach. “Disinformation is real, but so is the risk of conflating propaganda with legitimate dissent,” Electronic Frontier Foundation analyst Eva Galperin said.
Looking ahead, analysts expect activity to intensify if Israel moves on Rafah or if U.S. forces strike Iranian assets in Syria. “Every cruise missile launched in the Middle East will be met with a volley of tweets, videos and AI-generated headlines,” said former NSA official Jake Williams. The result, experts warn, could be a fog of war in which citizens struggle to separate fact from fabrication just as policymakers weigh life-and-death decisions.