As attacks spread after the bombing of Iran by US and Israeli forces, a video went viral of crowds staring at flames, smoke and debris billowing from the top of a high-rise building said to be in Bahrain.
Social media users claimed that an Iranian attack hit the skyscraper. But while buildings in Bahrain were bombed by Iranian missiles during the Iran War, this video was not real. They were created using artificial intelligence and were shared by accounts linked to the Iranian government as part of efforts to amplify their successes.
There are several pieces of evidence suggesting that the video was not authentic, including two cars on the left side of the clip that appear to be stuck together and a man in the lower right corner whose elbow appears to go straight through the backpack.
flood Distorted or fabricated videos have spread widely online since the Iranian war began last weekend, fueled in part by state-linked propaganda and influence campaigns — particularly over who is winning the war and how many casualties there have been.
“Content that comes from state actors tends to be a little better targeted,” said Melanie Smith, director of policy and research on information operations at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. “They have a very clear kind of narrative structure, and the videos are just used to support the kind of statements they want to make about the conflict and kind of the geopolitical situation in general.”
Pro-Iranian social media accounts have adopted a narrative that exaggerates the scale of destruction and death toll caused by the country’s military — a position supported by what is being reported in Iranian state media. This has led to a slew of AI-generated videos of supposed airstrikes, such as one in which a high-rise building caught fire in Bahrain.
An ongoing Russian-aligned influence operation called “Operation Overload,” also referred to as “Matryoshka” or “Storm 1679,” has been disseminating videos designed to impersonate intelligence agencies and news outlets, undermining people’s sense of security in an attempt to influence their behavior — a tactic the network has previously used during election cycles. For example, she shared a warning falsely attributed to Israeli intelligence telling Israelis in Germany and the United States to be careful when in public or not to go out at all.
Distorted and fabricated videos have been a major feature of other recent conflicts, such as the wars between Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Hamas, but experts say the main difference now is a lack of information from the Iranian public due to internet shutdowns and public censorship — a loss of views that could have worked for and against the Iranian government.
“In Ukraine, that message was so clear that it actually changed the whole dynamic of the conflict because the world really sided with the view of the Ukrainians confronting the attacks and showing resilience in light of the attacks, but we kind of miss that story from Iran,” said Todd Helmus, a senior behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation who studies irregular warfare, terrorism, and information operations.
In search of clicks, opportunistic social media users not associated with government agencies also contributed significantly to the disinformation that spread during the early days of the Iran war, presenting old footage from other conflicts as recent, sharing video game clips as real and posting their own AI-generated content.
Artificial intelligence, in particular, has helped fuel disinformation in ways that would not have been possible during past conflicts, even just a few years ago. Combined with misinformation and state-linked censorship, this creates a wider vacuum in which the truth can get lost.
“The amount of AI content is starting to pollute the information environment in these kind of crisis environments to a really terrifying degree,” Smith said. “Not being able to access verified, credible information in times like these – doing so is made more difficult.”
Nikita Beer, head of product for X, wrote in a Post Tuesday The platform will suspend users from its revenue sharing program if they post AI-generated content from armed conflict without proper disclosure. The suspension period is 90 days for the first violation and is permanent thereafter. Emerson Brooking, director of strategy and senior resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, warns that social media platforms are now front lines in the war, and users must be aware of the possibility of them being used by state actors, even if they are located thousands of miles away from action on the ground.
“If you are in these places, just understand that this is an extension of the physical battle space,” he said. “There are actors on all sides of the conflict actively trying to spread propaganda and misinformation to convince you that some things are true but they are not. And that your eyeballs and attention are assets.”
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