In the hours before Israeli forces bombed Evin prison in Iran’s capital on June 23, posts appeared on social media in Persian, foreshadowing the attack and urging Iranians to come free the prisoners.
Moments after the bombs struck, a video appeared on X and Telegram, purporting to show a blast at an entrance to the prison, which is notorious for holding political prisoners. One post on X included a hashtag, in Persian: “#freeevin.”
The attack on the prison was real, but the posts and video were not what they seemed. They were part of an Israeli ruse, according to researchers who tracked the effort.
It was not the only trickery during the conflict. Over 12 days of attacks, Israel and Iran turned social media into a digital battlefield, using deception and falsehoods to try to sway the outcome even as they traded kinetic missile strikes that killed hundreds and roiled an already turbulent Middle East. The posts, researchers said, represented a greater intensity of information warfare, by beginning before the strikes, employing artificial intelligence and spreading widely so quickly.
Information warfare, often called psychological operations, or psyops, is as old as war itself. But experts say the effort between Israel and Iran was more intense and more targeted than anything that had come before, and seen by millions of people scrolling on their phones for updates even as bombs fell.
The reason is that today’s technology — the ubiquity of social media and the advent of generative AI — has transformed the ability of countries to respond to events and to speak directly to citizens and others in real time in ways that are more believable than ever before.
Iran, for example, sent alerts in Hebrew to thousands of Israeli mobile phones warning recipients to avoid bomb shelters because militants planned to infiltrate them and attack those inside, according to researchers and official statements. A network of accounts on X attributed to Israel spread messages in Persian trying to erode confidence in Iran’s government, including ones narrated by an AI-generated woman.
“It’s certainly a new era of influence warfare,” said James J.F. Forest, a professor of security studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, who has written extensively on the subject. “There’s never really been a previous corollary in history where you had the ability to go to scale with this kind of propaganda.”
The Israeli Defense Forces declined to respond to questions about psychological operations. So did an official from the Iranian delegation to the United Nations in New York.
The torrent of propaganda and deception offers a preview of what the United States or other nations would almost certainly face if war erupted. False images of destroyed B-2 bombers appeared online when President Trump ordered strikes on Iran’s deeply buried nuclear sites.
Some question how prepared the United States is, especially with Mr. Trump’s administration cutting efforts to combat foreign influence operations. American military strategy embraces information operations — which have been known in the Pentagon since 2010 as Military Information Support Operations — but they have often been treated as little more than a supporting role.
Russia, followed by China, is regarded as the most assertive adversary when it comes to influence campaigns. It has waged a furious information war against Ukraine and its allies since launching a full invasion of the country in 2022. By some accounts, it has undercut support in some countries, including the United States.
“I think what most people would say is that we are not prepared in the military for the kind of information operations or psychological operations that might become mainstream in this century,” said David Millar, a former intelligence officer who until recently taught at the Foreign Service Institute, the State Department’s diplomatic training academy.
Israel and Iran both followed Russia’s playbook, trying to shape public opinion at home and abroad, but with the added ability to integrate widely available AI tools into their campaigns.
“If you go back to the early days of Ukraine, we saw disinformation campaigns from Russia, but they were pretty primitive as compared to what we saw in the early days of Gaza,” said Hany Farid, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a co-founder of GetReal Security, a company that first flagged the manipulated video of Evin prison. “That’s nothing,” he added, “compared to what we’re seeing in Iran.”
Actors on both sides of that conflict flooded the internet with manipulated or fabricated photographs and videos, seeking to demoralize and demonize the other.
The content included images from previous conflicts and obvious fabrications of Iran’s supreme leader and Israel’s prime minister. More subtle ones, like the video at Evin, were initially reported on as real by some news organizations, including The New York Times.
Mr. Farid contrasted today’s information warfare with efforts in World War II, when warring nations communicated with leaflets dropped from airplanes or by radio.
“With radio you had one message and you sent it out,” he said. “Now you have a million messages that you send out to a million individuals. That is obviously very, very different.”
The effect in the current conflict can be hard to measure with certainty. Citizens often rally behind their leaders when at war, viewing obvious propaganda with skepticism or derision. Even if psychological warfare does not change the course of a conflict, analysts say, it can shape public perceptions of it.
“There are certainly people who believe that it’s the narrative win that carries the day,” Mr. Millar said.
Iran’s efforts appeared aimed at a domestic and regional audience as much as Israel itself, said Ari Ben-Am, a co-founder of Telemetry Data Labs, a digital analytics company in Tel Aviv. That reflected “their desire to maintain a regional reputation,” he added.
One fabricated video showed devastation at Ben Gurion Airport in Israel that had not occurred. Photographs and video of wreckage of Israeli — and later American — aircraft appeared on accounts that researchers traced to Iran and its state media.
Iran claimed to have downed at least three Israeli F-35s, though. Israel’s military officials denied that it had lost any aircraft in the fighting, and no evidence has emerged to suggest otherwise. One image showed an implausible afterburner in the exhaust of one wrecked plane.
Iranian media even claimed to have captured an Israeli pilot, identified as Sarah Ahronot, but NewsGuard, a company that monitors disinformation in media, traced the photograph to one of a Chilean Navy lieutenant taken in 2011.
The New York Times
