IRAN'S INFORMATION BATTLEFIELD – The Moderate Voice

By Samine Joudat

On the first day of Trump’s Operation Epic Fury against Iran, the United States military struck a school in the south of the country multiple times, reportedly killing at least 175 people, mostly young children.

“I swear, it was the government that hit the school,” Alireza, my 33-year-old relative, insisted in an Instagram voice message to me. He claimed that Iran’s own armed forces had struck the Minab school. I shared multiple Western media sources and investigations revealing that American Tomahawk missiles had inflicted the damage. Where did Alireza, living in Iran, attain such misinformation, and why was he adamant about his position, even after the Pentagon tacitly admitted fault?

In Iran’s hyper-polarized society, events like the Minab tragedy spawn conspiracies, suspicions, and outright denials of reality rather than shared moments for mourning. Everything is part of a struggle for narrative control of this war. Nuance be damned. The result is bitter ruptures among Iranians inside and outside of the country as we reckon with the unrest and transformation of our besieged, beloved homeland.
The Iranian government tightly controls media inside the country. This isolation is entrenched by international sanctions, which deprive ordinary citizens from accessing the world. Persian-language media based outside of Iran have filled this vacuum—and they have their own motivations and state funding sources.

In the past decade, Iran International and Manoto, two London-based channels with mysterious origins and a clear anti-Islamic Republic editorial direction, have become the de facto sources of information for millions of Iranians. Both promote the son of Iran’s deposed last king, Reza Pahlavi, as the head of an inevitable government-in-waiting. Iran International received an initial investment of $250 million from the Saudi Arabian crown prince; Manoto’s funding comes from private venture capital sources with cultural ties to Israel and fondness for the Pahlavis. Pahlavi has also received support from Israel in the form of a reported cyber campaign that created automated bot followers and fake engagement with his social media posts.

On the algorithmic battlefront, Iranian state television and media (and other accounts sympathetic to the current government such as the media collective Explosive News) have set a new standard for 21st-century AI agitprop with offerings ranging from Lego rap videos to AI-generated film trailers, all supporting a narrative of this war as an American strategic blunder and distraction from the Epstein files. Through statements on X, Iranian officials are hoping to influence panic in the oil markets and exploit Trump’s lack of cohesive messaging about this war by, well, trolling him. Official Chinese accounts have waded in. For a brief while, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was unable to disprove convincingly an internet theory that he was dead.

We are now in a new era in which the digital world increasingly determines the analog one instead of vice versa. Donald Trump claims that Iran is a master manipulator in this kind of warfare, even as he excels at it too, timing Truth Social statements with the opening and closing of financial markets. All of this makes the intelligibility of this war an example of contemporary warfare itself. Narratives, economies, and geopolitics move in lockstep.

For many Iranians, this war has served as a depressingly stark reminder that their government and foreign actors both seek to manipulate them, eroding their agency. One ongoing debate among the Iranian diaspora concerns which state is censoring more in the war. Another centers on how many Iranians government forces killed, and under what circumstances, during the January protest massacres, which took place under the fog of an internet blackout. Numbers range from the government’s self-reported 3,117 to a U.S.-government-funded Iran human rights group (Human Rights Activists News Agency) figure of over 7,000. Iran International claimed, with uncorroborated evidence, that the deaths numbered over 36,500. Trump, meanwhile, posted 42,000 killed online while claiming 45,000 during his address on Iran on April 1.

Arguments like these have created a toxic, fractured, and paranoid global Iranian community. People on all sides claim to speak on behalf of Iranians. Meanwhile, they erase the real pain, trauma, and violence experienced by those with different political views—even as they share the same core love for their homeland. Tragedy could have led to a kind of solidarity that strengthens a future civil society. Instead, we Iranians find ourselves drawing battle lines. Charges of vatan foroosh, which literally translates to selling out your homeland, are meted out gratuitously.

For me, one of the most damning and tragic images of the past few months was the sight of Iranians in the diaspora rejoicing during the first few hours of the war. Not because the pain that they have suffered didn’t deserve a moment of respite, but because of the alienation I felt. We live in separate worlds. War was always an utter failure to me, the point of perhaps no return, where perpetrators of death and destruction placed my place of birth in their indiscriminate crosshairs. But looking at the screen, I saw that for other Iranians, war was a culmination, and something welcomed: the United States and Israel as liberators. A now semi-famous Iranian monarchist influencer based in Las Vegas found her following by doing a viral Trump dance on her TikTok and Instagram channels, celebrating the bombings. Later, in a cruel twist of irony, she shared that the attacks had killed her cousin. She blamed the Iranian government.

And yet I still find great optimism and potential in my homeland and my people. To echo the political theorist Antonio Gramsci, Iranian society from before this war is dying rapidly, and a new one struggles to be born. But there can be no future of liberation until we Iranians extricate ourselves from a deluge of information meant to manipulate and prey on our vulnerable emotions. To search for a version of our society in which Iran’s pre-Islamic and Islamic heritage and its multi-ethnic and rich cultural tapestry are unifying forces requires being honest about our own ideological biases. Many Iranians, like Americans, are guilty of consuming information that confirms what they already want to believe, with strict boundaries put up around religion, politics, and class. This is especially true in the diaspora. Civic growth requires open-mindedness, coalition-building, and messy overlaps with other Iranians of various backgrounds and beliefs.

To weave such a tapestry requires trust built on shared interests and realities. It requires a belief in values and people over states and political icons. In an always-online, meme-ified world of engagement and algorithms, building this broad coalition may be more dizzying than at any other point in contemporary history. However, an Iran worthy of the love we claim to have for it demands this of us.

Samine Joudat is an Iranian American researcher, editor, and creative director based in the Bay Area whose work revolves around the aesthetics and politics of culture. This was written for Zócalo Public Square