今天早上就看到这个，帮老朱贴个英文版。纽约时报的政治立场，是不可能为老川站台的，这样的文章才更有价值。
In asymmetrical war, Iran seeks edge through disinformation
Boston Sunday Globe
By Steven Lee Myers, Tiffany Hsu, and Stuart A. Thompson nEW yORK tImES
29 Mar 2026
the videos and posts relentlessly mock president trump or vilify him as a bloodthirsty leader who strikes civilian targets indiscriminately. they make up content about attacks on american and Israeli targets, including one on Wednesday that featured a fabricated video of a missile striking liberty Island in new york Harbor. they regularly mention Jeffrey Epstein.
Iran is waging what researchers have described as a sophisticated information war, aided by Russia and China, that is spreading content designed to exploit worldwide opposition to the uSIsraeli military campaign and deflect from the country’s losses on the battlefield.
nearly a month into the war, Iran’s state media outlets and covert operatives are producing a steady torrent of propaganda, overstated narratives, and outright disinformation. they are often wielding generative artificial intelligence tools to create increasingly realistic-looking images and videos, according to human rights organizations and research groups studying foreign influence.
much of the false content has been debunked, but not before reaching millions of people on X, Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, tiktok, and other social media platforms.
the information war, the researchers say, has given Iran’s beleaguered leadership a weapon almost as potent as its ability to disrupt the world’s energy economy by throttling shipments of oil through the Strait of Hormuz. While the impact of the information war can be difficult to measure, experts said it appeared to have stoked popular anger and unease about the conflict in the uS and beyond.
“they’re winning the propaganda war,” darren l. linvill, a director of Clemson university’s media Forensics Hub, said of the Iranians. “they were prepared for it more than the administration, because they’d been preparing for this entire conflict for 50 years.”
With the internet largely shut down inside Iran, the intended audience appears to be people outside the country.
many of the posts appear to come from accounts controlled by humans, rather than automated bots. Researchers at Clemson identified a furtive network of at least 62 accounts on X, Instagram, and Bluesky that spread pro-Iranian content.
Controlled by Iran’s Revolutionary guard, the accounts purport to be from Spanish-speaking users in texas, California, venezuela, and Chile and English speakers in England, Scotland, and Ireland.
In some cases, the content they shared had been lifted verbatim from posts published by real people, including prominent Western influencers such as Jackson Hinkle and mario nawfal, who each have millions of followers on X and are known for incendiary commentary on foreign affairs and conservative issues.
another campaign focused on a march 18 interview by tucker Carlson with Joe Kent, the former director of the national Counterterrorism Center who resigned in protest of the war, according to a report by Honest Reporting, a nonprofit advocacy group that critiques news reports it deems critical of Israel.
First, Rt, the Russian television channel, posted a clip of the interview in which Kent portrayed the attack as unjustified aggression. From there, dozens of accounts spread the same clip almost simultaneously.
“this was not simply organic virality,” the group said. It added, “actors with varying ideological positions aligned almost immediately around a single, highly specific message: that Israel had manipulated the united States into war.”
Iran has also seized on trump’s erratic statements and taken advantage of the weakening of uS government and corporate guardrails that once sought to counter false or misleading information.
One video fabricated with aI and posted on Instagram by an Iranian state network, ridiculed trump’s inability to persuade allies to provide military help to keep the Strait of Hormuz open to oil tankers. the video includes fakes of president vladimir putin of Russia and Kim Jong un of north Korea laughing while listening to a rap song.
“trump’s inability to do alliance management or coalition building before this war sort of started the fire, and Iran’s disinformation campaigns are just pouring gasoline on that,” said Jonathan Ruhe, an analyst at the Jewish Institute for national Security of america, an advocacy organization in Washington that supports strong ties between the united States and Israel.
the uS military has sought to debunk false claims, including another this week that falsely said Iran had downed an F/a-18 jet. Social media platforms have also moved to take down some obviously fabricated videos.
Even so, more continue to circulate, including content that trump and other uS government accounts have posted using aI-generated content and misleading narratives.
Russia and China, which have close relations with Iran and share a disdain for the unchecked use of uS military power, have in turn sharply criticized trump’s decision to attack. they amplified Iran’s propaganda and produced their own, according to the researchers.
although neither country has openly provided direct military support to Iran, influence operations in both countries have worked at times in a seemingly coordinated fashion, according to graphika, a company that analyzes content online.
Its researchers have documented numerous instances in recent weeks when Russian and Chinese state media or known covert influence operations amplified narratives that Iran has pushed — and vice versa.
Cyabra, a social media monitoring company, found that Iran had activated hordes of phony social media accounts to push a message of Iranian dominance on the battlefield, earning 145 million views in the first two weeks of the war.
