Engineered Fear: How Israeli AI Disinformation Operations Targeted Iranians and Our Community
The division, slander and fear that swept through our community in recent years was never organic. It was engineered.
Breaking new investigations from the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab and the Israeli outlet Haaretz confirmed what many Iranian Americans had long suspected: a state-directed influence operation, powered by thousands of fake accounts and artificial intelligence, has been working to manipulate Iranian and Iranian-American conversations online. Now we know it was being funded and managed by Israel.
A Manufactured Reality: Targeting Iranians in 2025
The findings describe a coordinated psychological operation to influence Iranians in the midst of the June war, propagandizing ordinary citizens and pushing them to take steps that would endanger their lives. Fake accounts posing as Iranians on social media pushed AI-generated videos and posts pushing for an uprising. These networks were not random chatter: they were timed to coincide with Israeli military operations.
One of the most brazen examples was a deepfake video showing an explosion at Tehran’s Evin Prison. It spread worldwide before journalists were able to confirm it was fabricated. Alongside such falsehoods, the campaign amplified monarchist voices, elevating Reza Pahlavi in an effort to manufacture consent for regime change at the barrel of a gun.
This was not grassroots activism. Investigators traced the networks back to private contractors tied to the Israeli government. The goal was clear: sow unrest inside Iran, fracture the diaspora abroad against diplomacy, and normalize the idea that war and imperialist regime change were inevitable. The 2025 operation targeting Iranians inside the country was not unprecedented. The very same tactics had already been deployed against the diaspora in 2022, with the aim of dividing our community and uniting factions around militarism.
A Rehearsed Playbook: Targeting the Diaspora in 2022
It’s critical to understand that this was not the first time these tactics were deployed. In 2022, during the Zan, Zendegi, Azadi movement, the same playbook was used to fracture the Iranian diaspora and attack anti-war voices.
Another newly released report from Social Forensics documented how disinformation networks - again tied to Israeli actors - unleashed waves of online harassment and smear campaigns against Iranian-American activists, journalists, and community organizations. Those forensic findings are not abstract analytics; they map directly onto real-world harm - violence, threats, and intimidation - captured by major outlets at the time.
Politico chronicled how this wave of disinformation and slander vilified Iranian Americans in the wake of the 2022 protests. One activist described being inundated with violent Persian-language threats, some threatening rape, others threatening to kill her. “I’ll find you and I’ll burn you alive,” one message declared. Some attackers even claimed to know where she lived.
The pattern extended beyond individuals to whole currents of political discourse. Alex Shams in Boston Review outlined how inauthentic social media accounts linked to Israel systematically targeted anti-war, anti-intervention voices while amplifying the profile of former Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi.
The New York Times reported how, while most figures inside and outside Iran opposed Israel’s war, certain prominent diaspora voices sought to capitalize on the chaos to advance militarist agendas. Veteran journalist Farnaz Fassihi later pointed to the 2025 Haaretz revelations as confirmation of the smear campaigns and vicious attacks she herself had faced since 2021 - simply for doing her job.
Others faced consequences just as unsettling. Journalist and analyst Negar Mortazavi was also subjected to relentless harassment, which escalated to a bomb threat against one of her public panels at the University of Chicago. Even elected officials were not spared: Washington State Rep. Darya Farivar recounted how disinformation campaigns surrounding the 2022 protests triggered death threats against her on the eve of her swearing-in.
What was dismissed then as paranoia or conspiracy is now documented fact. The lived experience of coordinated trolling, gaslighting, and harassment - particularly aimed at women, queer Iranians, and younger activists - has been vindicated with hard evidence.
Silencing, Not Debating
For years, Iranian Americans were told they were alone or in the minority for opposing war and supporting diplomacy. The opposite is true. NIAC’s 2025 YouGov poll shows that the majority of Iranian Americans favor peace and diplomacy - not war, not imperialist foreign meddling.
These disinformation campaigns were never about argument or persuasion. They were designed to silence. The goal was not debate but attrition: to exhaust, isolate, and drive people out of public life until only the loudest pro-war voices remained.
What makes these operations particularly insidious is the way they exploit collective trauma. Motivated actors with no stake in the wellbeing of Iranians weaponized our history of displacement, repression, and exile. They convinced our diaspora to attack one another, mistrust family and friends, and mistake manipulation for grassroots energy.
The harm has been real: fractured collective movements for diplomacy and a community less able to speak with a united voice against war.
A Broader Democratic Crisis
These operations are not confined to Iranians. The same disinformation networks bleed into American political life, distorting debates in Congress and in media coverage. They elevate fringe voices while drowning out mainstream Iranian-American perspectives, effectively shaping U.S. discourse with a foreign government’s agenda.
The precedent is dangerous. Just as recent reports revealed Israel paying influencers up to $7,000 a day to generate anti-Palestinian content online, the disinformation directed at Iranians represents a new form of state-sponsored propaganda - weaponized not only against adversaries abroad, but against democratic debate in the United States.
The use of generative AI and deepfakes marks a grim turning point. What Iranians are experiencing today foreshadows the information wars of tomorrow: disinformation scaled to industrial levels, personalized, automated, and capable of hijacking entire communities. This is not just a foreign policy issue; it is a civil rights issue. Free speech, democratic participation, and even personal safety are at imminent risk.
The Truth is Out
For too long, those raising alarms were met with dismissal. Iranian Americans who said they were being targeted by coordinated online harassment were accused of exaggeration. Organizations like NIAC, which consistently criticize both U.S. militarism and Iran’s human rights abuses, were smeared with baseless claims. Experts - especially women - were harassed until they left the field altogether.
Now the evidence is undeniable. These disinformation campaigns were not grassroots or organic. They were state-linked operations, designed to destabilize and divide.
What we do with this knowledge matters. We can no longer afford to treat foreign disinformation as a niche or secondary issue. It is a central feature of how wars in the 21st century are being sold, how communities are divided, and how democracy is manipulated.
Ultimately, the diaspora is one of the most powerful forces against war and for diplomacy that will fundamentally improve conditions for Iranians inside Iran fighting for more rights and freedom. There are imperialist state actors outside our community significantly motivated to destroy that.
Iranians in the diaspora can and do have debates and disagree about the best foreign policy of the U.S towards Iran. What’s been exposed now, though, is that others have co-opted the suffering of Iranians inside Iran to insert themselves in harmful ways in that discussion — ultimately for the cause of more war.
We must not allow these forces to exploit the tragedy of government repression in Iran to advocate for more bombs falling on Iranian civilians.
RESOURCES
Report on BBC Persian (فارسی)
Report on Radio Farda (فارسی)
Euro News Persian (فارسی)
BBC Persian (فارسی)
Nour News (فارسی)