Iran’s War Disinformation Machine Surges as State Media Push False Victory Claims, AI-Made Images

Iranian state-controlled media outlets have dramatically escalated their disinformation efforts since the United States and Israel launched military strikes against Iran on February 28, according to a new report by NewsGuard, the misinformation tracking organization. The report identified 18 war-related claims published by Iranian sources that were found to be false in the period after the attack began, compared with only five false claims in the two weeks before the strikes. This sharp spike in fabricated content suggests a coordinated attempt by Tehran to shape perceptions of the conflict at home and abroad, particularly around alleged battlefield victories that never happened. NewsGuard found that Iranian outlets are increasingly relying on AI-doctored images to lend credibility to these claims, and in many cases those manipulated images are produced outside Iran. The false claims range from the complete destruction of American military equipment in neighboring Qatar to the shooting down of US fighter jets over Tehran, and they are being amplified across state news services, Telegram channels linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and social media platforms. The timing of the surge—immediately after the opening salvos of the conflict—indicates that Iran’s state media apparatus sees disinformation as a central pillar of its war strategy, attempting to compensate for operational setbacks by manufacturing a narrative of resistance and retaliation.

One of the most prominent examples of this campaign was published by the Tehran Times, Iran’s state-controlled English-language newspaper, on social media platform X on February 28. The outlet shared a satellite image allegedly showing the destruction of a US radar at Qatar’s Al-Udeid Air Base, a sprawling American military installation that hosts the forward headquarters of US Central Command. In the post, the publication claimed: “An American radar in Qatar was completely destroyed today in an Iranian drone strike.” The image presented a before-and-after comparison, showing the radar site apparently intact in one frame and reduced to rubble in another. However, information warfare analyst Tal Hagin quickly dismantled the claim, revealing that the image was originally a Google Earth snapshot from February 2, 2025, which had been manipulated using artificial intelligence. Hagin pointed to obvious digital artifacts, including the fact that all the cars in the image remained in the exact same position across both frames, something that would be highly unlikely in a real before-and-after sequence. The Al-Udeid example illustrates a broader pattern in which Iranian state media uses sophisticated but flawed visual manipulation to fabricate evidence of military success, hoping that audiences will accept the images at face value before fact-checkers can intervene. In another case, Iranian state-linked accounts shared a video on March 4 that claimed to show a fighter jet being shot down over Tehran. The footage initially prompted Telegram channels linked to the IRGC to celebrate it as proof that Iran had downed a US F-15 fighter jet. But the Israeli Air Force later clarified that the video actually showed an Israeli F-35 shooting down an Iranian Yak-130 aircraft over Tehran, meaning the footage was not evidence of Iranian success but rather of Iranian loss.

The false claims have not been limited to satellite images and ambiguous videos. Mehr, a semi-official Iranian news outlet, reported that four Iranian ballistic missiles had struck the USS Abraham Lincoln, an American aircraft carrier deployed in the region. The report attributed the claim to a statement by the IRGC, lending it the weight of the country’s most powerful military institution. However, US Central Command, known as CENTCOM, issued a clear rebuttal on March 1, stating that the Lincoln was not hit and that the missiles did not even come close to the vessel. This was not an isolated incident of inflated military casualty figures. An IRGC spokesperson also claimed that 650 US troops had been killed or wounded in the first two days of the conflict, a figure published by Tasnim, a military-aligned Iranian outlet. CENTCOM responded by noting that only six US service members had been killed in the war with Iran at that point, underscoring the enormous gap between Iranian propaganda and the ground reality. In some cases, the Iranian disinformation effort has sunk to recycling video-game footage as fake combat footage. According to Factnameh, a Persian-language fact-checking website, some war images shared by Iranian sources were actually captured from Arma 3, a realistic military simulation video game that is frequently used in online disinformation campaigns. The reliance on such easily debunked material suggests that while Iranian state media is highly active in producing false claims, its quality control is poor, and its tactics are increasingly recognizable to open-source intelligence analysts and military officials.

Outside of Iran’s own state-controlled platforms, the same conflict has triggered a wave of pro-Iranian disinformation on mainstream social media, especially on Elon Musk’s X platform. A recent investigation by Wired magazine found hundreds of posts on X spreading misleading or false content about the conflict, including AI-manipulated images and exaggerated claims about the scale and success of Iranian missile attacks. Many of these posts appeared within minutes of real missile strikes, indicating a coordinated or automated effort to flood the platform with disinformation before verified information could emerge. One post, which was viewed more than four million times, purported to show ballistic missiles over Dubai but was actually footage of an Iranian attack on Tel Aviv from October 2024. Another post, which gained more than 375,000 impressions, featured a fabricated before-and-after image of the compound of the late Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei, falsely suggesting it had been damaged or destroyed. These social media posts are often detached from direct state control, yet they serve the same narrative purpose: amplifying Iranian strength, creating confusion about who is winning the conflict, and mobilizing domestic and regional audiences. The fact that many of these posts are created by accounts outside of Iran, sometimes using AI tools to generate realistic imagery, makes it harder for platforms and fact-checkers to identify and remove them quickly. As a result, falsehoods can reach millions of viewers before clarifications are issued, and even after debunks are published, the original images often continue to circulate.

Understanding how Iran spreads this disinformation requires looking at the information environment inside the country, where the government has imposed an almost complete blockade on independent internet access. On February 28, the web infrastructure company Cloudflare described Iran’s internet cutoff as a “near-complete shutdown,” noting that Iranian internet traffic plunged by 98 percent compared to the previous week. This extreme restriction means that the vast majority of ordinary Iranians have no access to foreign media outlets, social media platforms, or independent news websites. Instead, they are forced to rely on state-run radio and television broadcasts, which are directly controlled by the Iranian government and its security apparatus. The few domestic alternatives include the National Information Network, a state-controlled domestic internet network that operates separately from the global internet, and Bale, a state-backed messaging application. This closed information ecosystem is crucial to the success of Iran’s disinformation strategy because it prevents Iranian citizens from encountering credible counter-narratives. When state media claims that Iran has destroyed American warships or shot down American jets, most Iranians have no practical way to verify or challenge those claims. The government can therefore shape public opinion at will, using war coverage as a tool for domestic propaganda while the outside world sees a very different reality. The same internet shutdown also makes it easier for Iranian state media to reuse old videos, manipulated satellite images, and video-game footage without immediate local criticism, since independent fact-checkers are largely blocked from reaching Iranian audiences.

The impact of Iran’s disinformation campaign extends far beyond its borders, with foreign actors increasingly exploiting the same false claims for their own purposes. NewsGuard reported that Russia has been using Iran’s fake claims to undermine Ukraine and its allies, pushing narratives that Iranian missiles have destroyed Ukrainian military bases in Dubai—an geographically absurd claim that nonetheless thrives in the chaotic information environment. This collaboration between Iranian and Russian disinformation networks reflects a broader alignment between Tehran and Moscow, both of which seek to challenge Western military credibility and sow doubt about the accuracy of official US and Israeli statements. Despite the scale of the deception, however, the Iranian disinformation machine has repeatedly been exposed by independent analysts, military officials, and fact-checking organizations. The same open-source techniques that allowed Tal Hagin to spot the manipulated Al-Udeid image, and that enabled the Israeli Air Force to correct the record on the Tehran fighter jet video, continue to debunk the most egregious falsehoods. Yet the sheer volume of fake claims, combined with Iran’s domestic internet blackout and the rapid spread of AI-generated imagery, means that the truth often lags behind the propaganda. For the international community, the lesson is clear: Iran’s state media has turned disinformation into a weapon of war, and every alleged victory should be met with skepticism until verified by independent sources. For ordinary Iranians, the cost of this campaign is even higher, as they are cut off from the truth at the very moment their country is at war.