In late December and early January, as Iranians took to the streets to protest the country’s economic malaise, the Islamic Republic quietly began seeding onto social media its own narrative of events, in preparation for a brutal crackdown.
The uprising wasn’t organic or homegrown, according to posts by state-backed media accounts, but the shadowy work of the Central Intelligence Agency and Israel’s vaunted Mossad spy agency.
“The enemies, particularly the United States and Israeli regime, are focused on fueling insecurity in Iran by making use of the tools of soft warfare,” state-controlled Fars News Agency proclaimed on January 5, citing the chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces.
In the days that followed, particularly January 8 and 9, Iran’s security forces mowed down thousands of ordinary Iranians in an operation that is widely seen as the bloodiest in the country’s modern history.
Twinned with this crackdown has been a sophisticated, state-backed information offensive.
For the Islamic Republic to rely on claims of U.S. and Israeli involvement to justify its repression isn’t new.
The difference between this campaign and the Iranian regime’s frequent efforts to smear dissidents and protesters as foreign agents is that the push launched by the regime this time was not designed only, or even mainly, for domestic consumption.
It was directed just as much at ideological allies and supporters abroad, inserting the Islamic Republic’s propaganda into global political discussions and seeking to whitewash the massacre of Iranian protesters.
That campaign has succeeded in gaining the backing of a wide array of far-left media personalities, MAGA-aligned influencers, Russian-backed X accounts, and global bot farms. In the U.S. alone, white nationalist Nick Fuentes, The Young Turks media host Cenk Uygur, Gen Z influencer Calla Walsh, and the anti-Israel campaigner Max Blumenthal have parroted the regime’s line that the CIA and Mossad stoked the uprising.
Rutgers University’s Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) tracked Iran’s government narratives through over 300 X accounts, finding millions of views for posts that amplified Iranian propaganda—some from accounts that appear to be linked to state actors.
A newly released report, which NCRI researchers discussed exclusively with The Free Press, found that this social media narrative has become a key lever of foreign influence for the Islamic Republic. With signs that Iranians are ready to rise up again, and U.S. air and sea power massing outside Iran, regime opponents and human rights activists worry that the information tools that Iran has developed over the last months will be repurposed to shape the narrative of any conflict.
“This episode illustrates a broader mechanism of modern authoritarian resilience: Repression alone does not secure regime stability. Narrative control does,” Joel Finkelstein, co-founder and chief science officer at NCRI, told The Free Press.
“When state-aligned media and decentralized amplification networks converge to externalize blame, they can blunt international solidarity, fracture ideological coalitions, and recast domestic dissent as foreign aggression.
”The unrest in Iran began in late December among merchants protesting a catastrophic drop in Iran’s currency, then quickly spread to more general demonstrations, soon evolving into open calls for the end of the Islamic Republic itself. Iran’s government has officially claimed that around 3,000 Iranians died during January’s unrest. But human rights groups and the United Nations special rapporteur on Iran said the death toll could reach the tens of thousands.
Videos emerged of snipers shooting unarmed civilians from rooftops and body bags flooding local morgues.
As Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s regime orchestrated its massacre, Tehran intensified its information war in lockstep. NCRI researchers describe a step-by-step sequence—almost a digital playbook—in which Tehran framed the protests as a CIA–Mossad operation, amplified it online, and allowed sympathetic, outside actors to legitimize the narrative in real time.
How Islamic Republic's information war unfolded:
Iran’s information operation used X posts from a Persian-language account widely identified as affiliated with Israel’s intelligence services, Mossad, and an X post from U.S. Secretary of State and CIA Director Mike Pompeo to lend ballast to its narrative. Early in the protests, the accounts posted comments on X that appeared to lend moral support to the burgeoning Iranian uprising.
“Let’s come out to the streets together. The time has come,” the Mossad-affiliated account proclaimed on December 29.
“We are with you. Not just from afar and verbally. We are also with you on the ground.” Pompeo also posted a message of support on January 2, which included a quip implying that Iran was filled with Mossad agents.
As the Iranian regime intensified its crackdown on dissent, screenshots of the posts circulated rapidly across Persian-language Telegram channels and X, and government and regime-aligned commentators presented the Mossad and Pompeo posts as proof of foreign infiltration.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi took to X on January 10, just a day after the regime inflicted its worst violence on protestors, and wrote: “According to the US Government, Iran is ‘delusional’ for assessing that Israel and the US are fueling violent riots in our country.”
The diplomat attached a screenshot of Pompeo’s January 2 post. In a sign of the importance that Iran’s regime attached to influencing, Araghchi appeared on Fox News to advance the Mossad conspiracy narrative, and pushed it again in a post-crackdown op-ed in The Wall Street Journal.
NCRI researchers documented a surge in online traffic promoting the regime’s CIA-Mossad narrative—from January 6 through January 16—at a time when most of the country remained in a communications blackout.
NCRI found that most of this online engagement didn’t originate from Iranian state media itself, but from independent influencer accounts that carried the narrative into Western political ecosystems.
Central to this were two large accounts–@AdameMedia (with over 500,000 followers) and @Megatron_ron (nearly 600,000 followers)–which NCRI believes are likely fronts for foreign governments, potentially Russia. Much of this traffic appeared to utilize bot networks to amplify their messages.
On January 12, the @AdameMedia account described Iranian protesters as “Mossad backed rioters” and circulated footage that the account claimed showed opposition activists burning mosques, declaring: “These scum are the face of the movement.”Those claims were picked up by American social media influencers, both from the far left and MAGA right.
The MAGA-aligned influencer and media personality Nick Fuentes, who has 1.2 million followers on X, posted on January 11: “The chaos in Iran is totally astroturfed by Israel and the US for regime change. . . . Why do you think Iran wanted nuclear weapons? To prevent this exact scenario.”
The same day, far-left Israel critic Max Blumenthal, who has over 800,000 followers on X, claimed: “Mossad rent-a-rioters in Iran throw molotov cocktails at apartments and into a mosque filled with children. Supporters of these nihilistic regime change rampages are openly celebrating the violence.”
U.S. government and independent analysts who study Iran’s information networks told The Free Press that the regime has spent decades developing propaganda networks in the West specifically for times of crisis.
Much of this has been focused on finding ideologically aligned academics, journalists, and politicians, but also, increasingly, social media influencers. Blumenthal visited Iran last May as part of a regime-backed media trip.
“They have a very sophisticated network and they operate both in a coordinated manner and in a diffused manner,” Stanford University’s Abbas Milani, an Iranian-American scholar and historian, told The Free Press.
“Somebody sheds doubt about the number killed, somebody sheds doubt about who was doing the killing. . . . The goal is to dishearten the opposition.”
The Free Press and Iran International jointly published an investigation in 2023 that documented how Iran’s Foreign Ministry created a network of overseas academic and media influencers to promote its positions on the nuclear negotiations with the Barack Obama administration in 2014 and 2015.
Tehran called the network the Iran Experts Initiative. Now the kind of influence that was achieved piecemeal with individual outreach can be done at scale through social media. NCRI’s researchers said this stealth migration of regime talking points is how modern information warfare succeeds.
State narratives enter polarized digital ecosystems, then are reframed and repeated until the message no longer appears to originate from the state that benefits from it. NCRI and other activists are increasingly concerned that Tehran may be successful in muddying the reality of the January massacres.
The approach also hints at how Iran will likely seek to influence international opinion in any further conflict with the United States.
"The idea that this is somehow an operation from Mossad or the CIA is really an odd assertion given that the people doing the killing, as we see on video, are part of the regime,” said Gissou Nia, a human rights lawyer at the Atlantic Council. Nia and other activists have been stunned by the tepid international response to the massacre.
It took until January 23 for the United Nations Human Rights Council to formally condemn Iran’s crackdown. And leaders across the Arab world and West continue to engage with Iran’s leadership at the highest levels. So far, no state has formally called for an investigation by the International Criminal Court into the nationwide massacre.
Lawdan Bazargan, a human rights activist and former political prisoner in Iran, added: “More than 30,000 people are dead. . . . Not a single foreign agent was found among the victims.”
