Losing the war, losing the lie: Iran’s disinformation campaign unravels
When Iran’s missiles began flying on February 28, 2026, a second war was launched simultaneously, fought entirely with fabricated images, recycled videos, and outright lies. Within hours of the US-Israel strikes on Iran, Iranian state media flooded social platforms with battlefield “victories” that never happened, casualties that were invented, and dramatic footage pulled from video games in a coordinated disinformation operation on a scale that was simply staggering.
Since the United States and Israel launched attacks on Iran, NewsGuard, the news rating organization that monitors media credibility, identified 18 war-related claims by Iranian sources that were provably false. In the two weeks before the US-Israel strikes, NewsGuard had flagged just five false claims from Iranian outlets. The volume of lies tripled almost overnight.
The Iranian state-controlled outlet Tehran Times posted a satellite image on X on February 28 purporting to show the destruction of a US radar installation at Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar. The caption was unambiguous: “An American radar in Qatar was completely destroyed today in an Iranian drone strike.” The image showed a dramatic before-and-after of the site. There was one problem.
Information warfare analyst Tal Hagin traced the image back to a Google Earth photograph taken on February 2, 2025, a full month before the war began, that had been manipulated using AI. “One way to tell is that all the cars stayed in the exact same location,” Hagin wrote on X. The image had originated not inside Iran but from an X account called “Legitimate Targets” based in Austria.
Iranian state-linked sources also circulated a video on March 4 claiming to show a fighter jet shot down over Tehran, which Telegram channels linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) celebrated as evidence that Iran had downed a US F-15. The Israeli Air Force clarified that the footage was their own. It showed an Iranian Yak-130 being shot down over Tehran by an Israeli F-35. Iran’s propaganda had taken Israeli combat footage and repackaged it as an Iranian victory.
The semi-official outlet Mehr reported that four Iranian ballistic missiles struck the USS Abraham Lincoln, citing an IRGC statement as the source.
US Central Command responded on March 1 with a flat denial: “The Lincoln was not hit. The missiles launched didn’t even come close.”
Meanwhile, Tasnim, a military-aligned Iranian outlet, quoted an IRGC spokesperson claiming 650 US troops were killed or wounded in the first two days of fighting. CENTCOM confirmed that six US service members had been killed in the conflict, including troops killed in a March 1 Iranian drone attack on a US military facility at Port Shuaiba in Kuwait, a figure roughly 100 times smaller than what Iran was broadcasting to the world.
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