State-linked influence operations — including accounts associated with the Iranian government and a Russia-aligned network — have flooded social media with fabricated and misrepresented visual content since U.S. and Israeli forces bombed Iran last weekend, researchers and information-operations analysts said. The misinformation has focused on who is winning the conflict and how many casualties each side has taken.
Experts say AI tools have made it easier than ever to produce convincing fake footage at scale, while Iranian internet shutdowns have suppressed the kind of firsthand accounts that helped shape international opinion during earlier conflicts, leaving a vacuum that state propagandists and opportunistic content creators are actively filling.
State-linked influence operations have flooded social media with fabricated and misrepresented visual content since U.S. and Israeli forces bombed Iran last weekend, with accounts associated with the Iranian government and a Russia-aligned network among those driving the effort, researchers and information-operations analysts said. The campaign has concentrated on two narratives: who is winning the conflict and how many casualties each side has suffered.
“The content that’s coming from state actors tends to be a little better targeted,” said Melanie Smith, senior director of policy and research on information operations at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. “They have a very clear kind of narrative structure and the videos are just used to support some kind of statement they want to make about the conflict and about the kind of geopolitical situation writ large.”
AI-generated videos back Iranian claims
One example that circulated widely showed crowds watching fire and debris pouring from the top of a high-rise building, with accompanying claims that an Iranian missile had struck a skyscraper in Bahrain. The video was AI-generated and shared by accounts associated with the Iranian government, according to the Associated Press. Visual artifacts in the clip identified it as fabricated — including two cars on the left side of the clip that appeared stuck together and a man in the bottom-right corner whose elbow appeared to move through a backpack.
Pro-Iran social media accounts have broadly adopted a narrative exaggerating the destruction and death tolls claimed by Iranian forces, an approach aligned with coverage in Iranian state media. That framing has generated a large volume of AI-made videos depicting supposed strikes.
Russia-linked network targets Western audiences
A separate ongoing influence operation, known as Operation Overload and also referred to as Matryoshka or Storm-1679, has been posting videos designed to impersonate intelligence agencies and news outlets during the war, the AP reported. The Russia-aligned network has previously deployed similar tactics during election cycles. During the Iran war it shared a warning falsely attributed to Israeli intelligence telling Israelis in Germany and the United States to be cautious when in public or not go outside at all.
The operation aims to undermine audiences’ sense of safety in order to shape their behavior, according to researchers.
Iranian censorship deepens the information void
Iranian internet shutdowns and censorship have compounded the problem by limiting the flow of information from the Iranian public — a loss of perspective that researchers said would have worked both for and against the Iranian government had it been available.
“In Ukraine, that message was so full-throated it really changed the entire dynamic of the conflict because the world really aligned with the perspective of Ukrainians facing the attacks and showing resilience in light of the attacks, but we’re sort of missing that story from Iran,” said Todd Helmus, a senior behavioral scientist at RAND who studies irregular warfare, terrorism and information operations.
The absence of that unfiltered voice removes a check that might otherwise have tested both state propaganda and organic misinformation, researchers said.
Opportunistic users add to the volume
Non-state actors have also contributed heavily to the flood of false content. Opportunistic social media users unaffiliated with any government have posted old footage from other conflicts labeled as current, shared video game clips as real footage, and distributed their own AI-generated content, the AP reported.
“The volume of AI content is starting to just pollute the information environment in these kinds of crisis settings to a really terrifying degree,” Smith said. “The inability to get access to verified and credible information in times like this — it’s getting harder and harder to do that.”
Misrepresented and fabricated videos have featured in other recent conflicts, including the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas wars, but experts noted that Iranian censorship makes the current situation distinct.
Platforms respond
Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, said in a post Tuesday that the platform will suspend users from its revenue-sharing program if they post AI-generated content from an armed conflict without proper disclosure. A first offense carries a 90-day suspension; a repeat offense results in a permanent ban, Bier said.
Emerson Brooking, director of strategy and resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, warned that users worldwide should understand their attention is itself a resource being actively pursued by all parties to the conflict.
“If you’re in these spaces, just understand that this is an extension of the physical battle space,” Brooking said. “That there are actors on all sides of the conflict that are actively trying to spread propaganda and disinformation to convince you that certain things are true that aren’t. That your eyeballs and your attention are an asset.”