Introduction: When Social Media Becomes a Battlefield

Since October 7, 2023, war has no longer been confined to the ground. A parallel front has opened in the digital space — a contest over narrative, over image, over who controls what reaches the eyes of millions. But this front did not emerge suddenly, nor was it born of the Flood.

In the early years of the second decade of this millennium, as the squares of the Arab world ignited, social media appeared to have shattered a monopoly decades in the making: the state’s monopoly over image and voice. Activists in Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria documented what official cameras refused to show, delivering it directly to the world and bypassing newsrooms and their gatekeepers. The prevailing narrative at the time held that the internet liberates — that the digital space is naturally aligned with the dispossessed.

That narrative did not last long. Governments, security agencies, and major institutions absorbed the lesson quickly and invested in this space with a strategic, not reactive, logic. In Sudan, multiple reports — including those from Amnesty International and Facebook’s Threat Intelligence team — documented coordinated, non-spontaneous campaigns that weaponized digital platforms in the conflict between rival military forces.[1] What unfolded was not spontaneous popular expression but a managed political communication operation. The digital space was no longer the activists’ playground — it had become a battlefield in the literal strategic sense.

Against this backdrop, the Iranian case emerges as an exceptional model worthy of examination. Iran does not operate from a position of digital strength — its adversary commands Hollywood, the major platforms, the dollar, and a network of media alliances stretching from the Gulf to London, while Tehran operates under sanctions that sever it from Western digital infrastructure, with eroding domestic legitimacy and a fragmented regional audience. And yet, the Iranian government allocated no less than $600 million to its media activities in the fiscal year 2024–2025 — in the midst of a severe economic crisis and inflation that has impoverished tens of millions.[2] The figure alone does not measure impact. What does measure it is what the other side does in response: the United States raised USAGM’s budget to $944 million in its FY2024 request, citing explicitly in official documents the necessity of countering “Iranian information manipulation” — not an analytical judgment, but an official admission that Iran’s narrative reaches its audiences and carries a cost.[3]

How did Iran build this system? And from what materials?

The Information War After October — Mapping the Landscape

October 7 was designed to be filmed. The attack was engineered to impose its own narrative from the moment of execution, bypassing the newsrooms that had monopolized for decades the power to define what happened and who was responsible. It was not a military operation that the media later documented through its own lens — it was an event designed for broadcast from the first moment, in the words of those who planned and carried it out. Fighters wore body-mounted cameras that recorded the incursions in real time, but publication did not begin immediately. Roughly forty minutes after the rocket barrage began, a pre-recorded address by Mohammed Deif was broadcast[4] — timing that was anything but arbitrary. The media silence in those forty minutes allowed the forces to reach their targets before the other side could absorb the scale of the breach. When the address ended, hundreds of pre-recorded clips flooded the digital space simultaneously, filling it with image and narrative at once.

The results were measurable: Hamas’s Qassam Brigades Telegram channel gained more than 135,000 subscribers on the first day alone, tripled within a week, and each post reached approximately 239,000 views — ten times its pre-war figures.

The early days saw a massive surge of Arab and Muslim expression in support of the operation across digital platforms — a wave difficult to measure precisely in the absence of neutral academic studies documenting its actual scale. The most detailed sources on this file carry a clear institutional orientation that warrants caution: the Israeli digital intelligence firm Cyabra tracked approximately 40,000 fake accounts and attributed to them more than 25% of conflict-related engagement — cited here for completeness, not as authoritative evidence.[5] The gap in neutral documentation reflects a deeper structural imbalance: whoever controls the tools to measure the digital space determines what counts as “support” and what counts as “manipulation.”

Hezbollah: From Military Media Unit to the Second Digital Generation

Before Hezbollah built its digital infrastructure, it built its media infrastructure. As early as 1984, it established a specialized military media unit — predating the internet era — tasked with documenting operations, producing materials, and distributing them through aligned channels. This early foundation explains the organization’s smooth transition into the digital space: the architecture was already in place, and the media logic already established.[6]

Al-Manar — which describes itself as “the television of the Lebanese resistance against Israeli occupation” and broadcasts in four languages — was the organization’s primary media face. But the major platforms progressively curtailed its reach. This accumulated pressure pushed Hezbollah toward Telegram from the mid-2010s onward, leveraging the platform’s limited moderation and its capacity for real-time field footage. This architecture — which historian Augustus Richard Norton describes as the expression of a “hybrid actor” combining armed resistance, political party, and social services network[7] — was never separate from its media system. It was a natural extension of it.

After October 2023, the organization found itself under dual pressure: military and digital. Israel pressed American and European technology companies to curtail its digital presence, and Meta and X proceeded in January 2024 to delete hundreds of affiliated accounts.[8] The response was adaptation, not retreat: Hezbollah multiplied its mirror channels on Telegram, expanded its encrypted networks, and its military media unit continued producing field footage distributed through a web of aligned channels. This adaptation appears to extend a deeply embedded logic — since 2008, Lebanese cabinet minutes documented the existence of an independent wired communications network outside state control, which the government at the time described as “an assault on sovereignty.”[9]

Following the November 2024 ceasefire, the organization launched coordinated campaigns on Telegram bearing unified hashtags such as “Victory from God” and “The Banner Has Not and Will Not Fall” — a documented effort to frame the war’s outcome as a victory and preserve political legitimacy during the reconstruction phase.[10]

But more telling than the official discourse is what emerged in parallel: a “second digital generation” of aligned media — platforms operating outside the organization’s formal structure, addressing its audience in a different register. Outlets such as Al-Mahatta (144,000 subscribers, 28 million views) and Tayoun (1.25 million views within weeks of launch), along with Al-Khanadeq and podcasts such as Podium and Riwaya Thaniya, produce analytical and investigative content addressing elites and youth through the tools of the digital age.[11] This content was accompanied by a parallel popular current of digital satire and memes — from sarcastic maps mimicking Israeli evacuation notices to clips comparing the Iron Dome system to a “sieve” — a phenomenon the author tracked through direct monitoring of Lebanese X, TikTok, and Instagram accounts between October 2023 and early 2025.[12]

These platforms share an editorial line supportive of the resistance option. One explicitly describes itself as “independent but not neutral,” while none has demonstrated documented organizational affiliation with any party.

Iran — The Political Communication System: How War Is Waged in Words

Iran faces a structurally asymmetric equation. Its adversary commands Hollywood, CNN, Meta, Google, the dollar, and a network of media alliances stretching from the Gulf to London. Iran, meanwhile, operates under sanctions that sever it from Western digital infrastructure, with a fragmented regional audience and eroding domestic legitimacy. And yet it has built a political communication system capable of destabilizing its adversaries’ narratives and forcing Washington to expend real effort in the information contest.

The Architecture: From Khamenei to the Echo Chambers

Understanding Iranian political communication requires first understanding its structure. What appears to the outside observer as a chaos of conflicting statements, anonymous accounts, and unofficial channels is, in fact, a structured system operating with a hierarchical logic documented from multiple research angles.

The apex sets the direction. The Supreme Leader’s addresses confer moral and political legitimacy on the narrative and define the enemy and the course of action. The aligned security and media institutions then translate these directives into operational content: statements, videos, and evidence. In the third tier, a network of aligned channels on Telegram and other platforms in multiple languages serves as an echo chamber — amplifying the narrative with sharper rhetoric without formal attribution to the state.

This three-tier design is what grants the system its flexibility: the state preserves its official credibility while the aligned networks are given latitude in the more chaotic space. The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) documented this logic in its comprehensive study of Iranian digital efforts,[13] describing it as an “information laundromat” — in which an official channel produces content, fake websites republish it, and then aligned networks circulate it as if it were an independent source, until it reaches audiences with no knowledge of its original origin.[14]

The Triangulated Audience: Three Messages for Three Minds

What distinguishes Iranian political communication is the differentiation of messages according to target audience — a different approach in style, tool, and content for each audience.

For the Domestic Iranian Audience

The system operates on two parallel levels. The first is the instrumentalization of economic crisis — linking tangible livelihood pressures to external sanctions rather than domestic policies.[15] The second is the management of information flow itself: when protests erupted in December 2025, documented reporting showed how the government distributed “blank SIM cards” to regime supporters to circumvent internet blackouts and propagate the official narrative[16] — reflecting Tehran’s view that the domestic information battle is a direct extension of the external war: the United States and Israel target not only military infrastructure but seek to instrumentalize the Iranian domestic sphere as a tool of pressure or destabilization.

For the Arab Audience

The system relies on two parallel layers. The first is official and visible: Al-Alam, the Arabic-language channel. A review of Al-Alam’s website and its Instagram and X accounts in April 2026 reveals a recurring pattern: official IRGC statements positioned alongside field reports, analytical pieces, live broadcasts, and talk programs — all within a single interface that mimics the format of mainstream Arab news channels. Notably, the breaking news ticker carried “exclusive information from Press TV” about a failed American operation in Isfahan — a “scoop exchange” mechanism between two official channels designed to reinforce each other’s credibility with Arab audiences.[17]

On Instagram, the register shifts: memes, AI-generated images, and human-interest stories such as “the pink rocket built at a little girl’s request” — content that transforms a military event into a shareable popular story in the language of young audiences.

For the Western Audience

The system relies on narratives centered on anti-imperialism, solidarity with Palestine, and resistance to Western hegemony — narratives that find resonance among Global South audiences and the Western left. A review of The Cradle website in April 2026 presents, at first glance, an independent Western journalism platform: clean design, sections for investigations, interviews, and podcasts, and Western writers publishing under their real names — Pepe Escobar, Kit Klarenberg. No Iranian flags, no official insignia. The crowdfunding model mimics The Guardian. Yet the editorial line consistently adopts the Axis of Resistance narrative, directed at a sophisticated Western readership that would never engage with Press TV. No documented evidence of a direct organizational link to Iran exists[18] — but the pattern reveals a clear function: legitimizing the narrative before an audience that rejects its official sources.

The Khatam al-Anbiya Spokesman as Political Communication Tool

In this context, a striking model emerges: Ibrahim Zolfaghari, the official spokesman for the Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters — the joint operations command responsible for coordinating the Iranian army and the IRGC. His official role is to issue military statements and explain operational details, but his approach has exceeded the boundaries of the conventional military spokesman.[19]

On March 22, 2026, Zolfaghari became a viral phenomenon: addressing the camera directly in English, he declared “Hey Trump, you’re fired” — borrowing the signature phrase from The Apprentice. The clip garnered millions of views within hours.[20] He had previously addressed Arab audiences in Arabic. In another statement, he declared that the war “is decided on the battlefield, not on social media” — while producing viral social media content for precisely that purpose. This approach reveals a pattern in Iran’s communication system: the official military spokesman addresses multiple audiences in their own languages — Arabic for the Arab audience, English for the Western audience and the American leadership directly — borrowing the adversary’s language and idiom and turning it against them.

Resilience Through Circumvention

This survey reveals a system engineered for resilience and disruption in a digital space governed by a massive imbalance of power. Iran has developed what might be called an “information circumvention strategy”: a hierarchical structure that provides discipline; smart audience segmentation that enables multi-channel reach; deliberate ambiguity that provides room for maneuver; and multiple content layers — from the official channel to the aligned platform with an independent veneer — that provide plausible deniability when required.

The use of artificial intelligence within this system serves a specific purpose: amplifying real events and weaponizing them emotionally before they can be absorbed or verified — an approach that differs from outright fabrication but produces a comparable effect in shaping the audience’s initial impression.

The question of actual impact, however, remains open and unresolved. The documented gap between the volume of output and the depth of engagement with Arab audiences requires careful contextual reading: the Arab digital space is not a vacuum — it is, on the contrary, a densely contested terrain saturated by counter-messaging from Gulf media, Western platforms, and Israeli influence operations. The limits of Iranian impact may reflect the ferocity of competition within that same space, not a weakness of the instrument itself.

What can be said with confidence is that this system has succeeded in at least one thing: it has forced Washington to expend real effort in opposing it. And that alone, in the asymmetric equation within which Iran operates, is not a marginal outcome.

A Methodological Note on Sources

This article draws on sources that vary in their institutional orientations. The following classification is provided to enable readers to situate them appropriately:

Relatively neutral academic and research sources: DFRLab / Atlantic Council; ISD (UK); FPRI; Stimson Institute.

Independent investigative journalism: Rest of World; IranWire; Amnesty International; Human Rights Watch.

Sources with a Western security orientation: Irregular Warfare Institute; SOF Support Foundation. Used with caution and corroborated by parallel sources.

Israeli sources: INSS; ICT. Cited with explicit identification of institutional affiliation and not used as sole basis for any conclusion.

Author’s field observation: Direct review of Al-Alam, Press TV, and The Cradle websites and accounts, April 2026.

Primary sources: Lebanese cabinet minutes, 2008; platform self-descriptions; subscriber and view data extracted directly from YouTube.

Bibliography

Amnesty International and Meta Threat Intelligence. “Sudan: Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior and Armed Conflict Narratives.” Report, 2023. https://www.amnesty.org.

Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab). “Iran’s Digital Influence Operations.” February 2020. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/IRAN-DIGITAL.pdf.

DFRLab. “TrollTracker: An Iranian Messaging Laundromat.” Medium, 2019. https://medium.com/dfrlab/trolltracker-an-iranian-messaging-laundromat-218c46509193.

Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT). “Hezbollah on Telegram: Post-Ceasefire Campaigns.” 2024. https://ict.org.il/hezbollah-on-telegram/.

Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD). “Axis of Amplification: Regime Media Proxies and Western Supporters Respond to Iranian Protests.” 2022. https://www.isdglobal.org/digital-dispatch/axis-of-amplification-regime-media-proxies-and-western-supporters-respond-to-iranian-protests/.

Iran International. “Iran’s Propaganda Budget Allocated with No Checks and Balances.” May 13, 2024. https://www.iranintl.com/en/202405139799.

IranWire. “Propaganda vs. Reality During Iran’s Internet Blackout.” 2025. https://iranwire.com/en/news/147453.

Irregular Warfare Institute. “Hezbollah’s Information Warfare in the Post-October 7 Era.” 2024. https://irregularwarfare.org/articles/hezbollahs-information-warfare-in-the-post-october-7-era/.

Mosheiff, Amir. “Hezbollah’s Online Battleground: Military Media Units and Narratives on Telegram.” Global Network on Extremism and Technology (GNET), December 18, 2023. https://gnet-research.org/2023/12/18/hezbollahs-online-battleground-military-media-units-narratives-on-telegram/.

Norton, Augustus Richard. Hezbollah: A Short History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Perrigo, Billy. “Inside the Media War over the Israel-Hamas Conflict.” Time, November 2023. https://time.com/6549544/israel-and-hamas-the-media-war/.

U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM). FY 2024 Congressional Budget Justification. March 14, 2023. https://www.usagm.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/FY2024_CBJ_Final_3-14-23.pdf.

“Lebanese Government Attacks Hezbollah Communications Network.” Al Jazeera Arabic, May 6, 2008. https://www.aljazeera.net/news/2008/5/6/.

“Who Is Ibrahim Jafari Zolfaghari, Spokesman for Khatam al-Anbiya Headquarters?” Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, 2026. https://www.alaraby.com/news/.

[1]Amnesty International and Meta Threat Intelligence, “Sudan: Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior and Armed Conflict Narratives,” Report, 2023, https://www.amnesty.org.

[2]Iran International, “Iran’s Propaganda Budget Allocated with No Checks and Balances,” May 13, 2024, https://www.iranintl.com/en/202405139799.

[3]U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), FY 2024 Congressional Budget Justification, March 14, 2023, 1, https://www.usagm.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/FY2024_CBJ_Final_3-14-23.pdf.

[4]Mohammed Deif speech, October 7, 2023, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cxL5_Nw1l0.

[5]Billy Perrigo, “Inside the Media War over the Israel-Hamas Conflict,” Time, November 2023, https://time.com/6549544/israel-and-hamas-the-media-war/. Note: Cyabra is an Israeli digital intelligence firm; its data is cited here for completeness, not as authoritative evidence.

[6]Amir Mosheiff, “Hezbollah’s Online Battleground: Military Media Units and Narratives on Telegram,” Global Network on Extremism and Technology (GNET), December 18, 2023, https://gnet-research.org/2023/12/18/hezbollahs-online-battleground-military-media-units-narratives-on-telegram/.

[7]Augustus Richard Norton, Hezbollah: A Short History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 1–15.

[8]John Nagl et al., “Hezbollah’s Information Warfare in the Post-October 7 Era,” Irregular Warfare Institute, 2024, https://irregularwarfare.org/articles/hezbollahs-information-warfare-in-the-post-october-7-era/.

[9]“Lebanese Government Attacks Hezbollah Communications Network,” Al Jazeera Arabic, May 6, 2008, https://www.aljazeera.net/news/2008/5/6/.

[10]Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT), “Hezbollah on Telegram: Post-Ceasefire Campaigns,” 2024, https://ict.org.il/hezbollah-on-telegram/.

[11]Subscriber and view data extracted directly from YouTube, April 2026: Al-Mahatta channel https://www.youtube.com/@Almahatta0; Tayoun channel https://www.youtube.com/@Tayounn.

[12]Author’s field observation via monitoring of Lebanese X, TikTok, and Instagram accounts, October 2023–early 2025.

[13]Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), “Iran’s Digital Influence Operations,” February 2020, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/IRAN-DIGITAL.pdf.

[14]DFRLab, “TrollTracker: An Iranian Messaging Laundromat,” Medium, 2019, https://medium.com/dfrlab/trolltracker-an-iranian-messaging-laundromat-218c46509193.

[15]Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), “Axis of Amplification: Regime Media Proxies and Western Supporters Respond to Iranian Protests,” 2022, https://www.isdglobal.org/digital-dispatch/axis-of-amplification-regime-media-proxies-and-western-supporters-respond-to-iranian-protests/.

[16]IranWire, “Propaganda vs. Reality During Iran’s Internet Blackout,” 2025, https://iranwire.com/en/news/147453-propaganda-vs-reality-during-irans-internet-blackout/.

[17]Author’s field observation: review of Al-Alam channel website and its Instagram and X accounts, April 2026, https://www.alalam.ir.

[18]Author’s field observation: review of The Cradle website, April 2026, https://thecradle.co.

[19]“Who Is Ibrahim Jafari Zolfaghari, Spokesman for Khatam al-Anbiya Headquarters?” Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, 2026, https://www.alaraby.com/news/.

[20]Ibrahim Zolfaghari, “Hey Trump, you’re fired,” YouTube Shorts, March 22, 2026, https://www.youtube.com/shorts/PmO_vgDsCi0.