Tehran has reportedly initiated a new digital offensive on Western social media platforms, including a clandestine influence operation designed to sway American sentiment and challenge President Donald Trump's pursuit of a nuclear agreement, analysts disclosed on Sunday.
Following the United States' February strikes on Iran, which significantly impacted Tehran's leadership, and the subsequent signing of an interim memorandum of understanding between the two nations, observers suggest that Iranian officials are increasingly relying on digital proxies to maintain a centralized command structure.
Tehran's Evolving Digital Strategy
Mohammed, from the George Washington Program on Extremism, explained that the Iranian government has shifted its struggle for legitimacy onto digital platforms, optimizing its messaging for this new arena. "There are English, screenshot-ready lines, memeable contempt and civilizational pride. It is adaptation under pressure — an influence operation forced by the fact that the men running Iran can no longer stand at a podium," he stated.
After the death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on February 28, much of the regime's senior leadership was eliminated, and the new leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, remains out of public sight. Mohammed noted that Iran's digital communications have become notably more centralized since these events.
"The coordination between the leadership is visible: You watch the same lines reposted verbatim by the judiciary chief, the vice president and the security council within minutes," Mohammed elaborated. "That is a central media shop pushing copy, not officials independently moved by the same spirit at the same moment. And the register gives it away."
According to Mohammed, the regime's accounts on the social media platform X serve as a manufactured stand-in for the leadership void. These accounts also exploit existing political divisions within the United States, a tactic that intensified after President Trump signed a new peace accord in Versailles on June 17.
Exploiting US Political Divisions
Mohammed highlighted that Tehran's strategy does not view the United States as a monolithic entity. "It reads Washington as two power centers and pitches to both — working to embarrass the deal the president owns while speaking the language of multipolarity back to the worldview it attributes to the vice president," he remarked.
As an illustration, following the signing of the agreement and the initial round of negotiations in Switzerland, President Trump announced on Truth Social that previously frozen Iranian assets would be utilized to purchase American agricultural goods, such as soybeans, wheat, and corn.
He specified that the Treasury Department would release these Iranian funds "into escrow, controlled by the United States, and will be used for the purchase of food and medical supplies, exclusively from the United States, including corn, wheat and soybeans from our great American farmers. These are things that are desperately needed by Iran."
However, the regime's lead negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, used his X account to mock these claims as "trash talks."
America falsely claims our unfrozen assets will buy their agriculture. Interesting. The only crop we're harvesting is what you planted: decades of mistrust. It's organic, abundant, and homegrown. But apparently the U.S. only exports GMO soybeans, broken promises and trash talks.
Mohammed argued that the "agriculture jab is aimed straight at Trump, who personally sold the frozen-assets release to American farmers as a corn-and-soybean windfall, so mocking 'GMO soybeans and broken promises' is built to embarrass the deal he owns." He added that "Tehran gains if it can discredit the deal the president is selling."
He further suggested that such posts are not authored by a 64-year-old Iranian speaker independently, but rather by a younger social media team operating under his name. In contrast, Mohammed observed that President Trump's posts are his own, with the "account and the man the same." He contrasted this with the Iranian accounts, which "come from an institution manufacturing a public presence for a leadership that can no longer appear in person."
A Two-Tiered Information War
While ordinary Iranian citizens contend with severe internet restrictions domestically, Tehran's elite maintain unrestricted access to international platforms to engage Western audiences.
Another analyst, Toker, noted that these regimes are increasingly adept at combining social media, artificial intelligence, and internet censorship to wage asymmetric information warfare. This allows them to benefit from a global audience while avoiding accountability to their own populace. "There is a two-tier system in which government officials can use the platform freely to promote their agenda while denying access to their citizens, as they do in Iran," Toker explained. "It's a double-edged sword — you get more open politics at the cost of regime propagandization." He concluded that "Iranian authorities, among others, are getting better at gaming this system."
Mohammed asserted that these parallel systems — a heavily censored internet for domestic use and an "open megaphone" directed at Western audiences — offer compelling evidence that the campaign is an external influence operation, rather than a reflection of genuine domestic discourse.