Social Media About the Iran War Is Full of Fakes. Tread Carefully.

Commentary

The internet is awash in viral fake news about the war in Iran. The main culprits are individuals paid as little as $8 per million views through standard monetization incentives. Social media companies cannot easily check the veracity of the material, which is leading to an explosion of fake content generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and recycled footage.

One of the most recent discoveries of fake material is two AI-generated photos of U.S. air strikes on what are supposedly military decoys painted on runways. One was a painting of an Iranian fighter jet, and the other a decoy helicopter. The photos were used as propaganda to attempt to make the United States look uninformed, and were reported as fake on March 13.

The propaganda war includes the faking of real deaths and the denial of real evidence with false claims that it is AI-generated. If all this sounds confusing, it is purposefully so. Both sides in Iran are trying to spin real and fake news through the use of fake evidence and its fake denial.

Although some of the fake material is anti-Iran, most is pro-Iran. Iranian state-influenced media and fake personas run by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, also distribute fake material. They attempt to tell a story of Iranian military strength and U.S. defeat.

Iran’s state media and social media influencers have distributed fake AI-generated images of satellite photos, U.S. deaths, a decimated U.S. aircraft carrier, a bombed radar installation in Qatar, and a U.S. Embassy on fire in Saudi Arabia. The reality is usually the opposite—limited damage done by Iranian missiles and drones while the U.S. and Israeli militaries have destroyed almost the entirety of Iran’s air force, navy, and nuclear weapons development infrastructure.

A related issue is the spin some media organizations are giving to the news through headlines. U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth pointed out that arguing that the war is “widening” or that the Trump administration did not fully consider the risk that Iran would target shipping in the Strait of Hormuz is overplayed by headline writers.

The administration has responded to the allegations that the United States is winning the war, and the administration has fully considered the risks to global oil shipping. The United States is not only prioritizing the destruction of any remnants of Iran’s nuclear weapons program and its terrorist infrastructure, but also not feeling much of a pinch from more expensive oil, given that the United States is one of the biggest global producers of the energy source.

During the war, fake images have been shared hundreds of millions of times before being publicly identified as fake and taken down. One fake image alone, of U.S. Delta Force soldiers taken into custody by Iranians, was viewed more than 5 million times. Some of Iran’s fake images include satellite photos that supposedly show the regime’s successful hits against U.S. and allied structures.

Others are anti-Semitic or share conspiracy theories that U.S. President Donald Trump started the war to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein controversy. One pro-Iran social media account claimed the death of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Another claimed credit for downing a U.S. fighter jet, which was in fact the result of friendly fire by Kuwait. An Iranian regime-linked social media account claimed the deaths of 560 Americans when, at the time, there had been fewer than 10.

There are ways to tell the difference between AI fakes and reality. Does anything look or sound incorrect, such as mismatched audio, overly quiet sounds for the setting, unintelligible voices, unnatural textures, lighting inconsistencies, text distortions, fake place names, strange behavior of flames, morphing objects, hallucinations, or video glitches? Are there static images in before-and-after photos that would not be there years later?

Users can check images using Google’s SynthID to find invisible AI watermarks. TinEye helps find recycled material through a reverse image search. Some AI video generators have an eight-second limit, so short videos are another red flag.

However, the quality of AI images is improving so quickly that these red flags could be gone soon. Any new and sensational material can and should be checked against multiple trusted sources before being believed or shared. If there are no obvious inaccuracies in an image, it could be real. But not all sources are the same. When one social media AI bot was asked to identify fake photos, for example, it reportedly misidentified some of them as genuine and generated fake material to support its conclusion. So tread carefully, especially on social media.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.