In January 2026, as demonstrations swept Iran, a hashtag started trending on X, #FreeThePersianPeople. It seemed to be the true voice of an agitated people in need of change to the common eye. The only issue was that there were only 94 percent of tweets. Less than 170 accounts were creating original content, although the campaign did reach over 18 million users. This did not happen in a spontaneous uprising. It was a carefully planned digital attack associated with Israel – aimed not at giving voice to the Iranians, but at substituting it with an Israeli-made story. This is the future of war, where the use of public diplomacy is becoming blurred with psychological operations.
The Anatomy of a Digital Hijacking
The #FreeThePersianPeople is a milestone in the history of information warfare. The information showed spikes of activity that were sharp and intermittent the signature of coordinated inauthentic behavior as opposed to the organic public conversation. Naming’s were changed many times. There was templated and recycled content. However, the real genius of the campaign was its narrative structure. Instead of just declaring its support to the Iranian protesters, it has redefined the entire war. Bread and fuel grievances turned into a civilian confrontation between the Freedom and Political Islam. It was no longer the protest against corruption, but the people vs. the regime. The most telling, however, was the fact that campaign was based on the unstopping promotion of Reza Pahlavi, the son of the former shah of Iran, as the only political alternative. To most of the Iranians, Pahlavi is burdened by the baggage of the CIA-arranged comeback of his father in 1953. However, within the online vacuum formed by the campaign, he seemed to enjoy massive backing. The algorithm is unable to differentiate between real fame and artificial publicity.
The Israeli Fingerprints
The intervention of Israeli officials makes this operation a little higher than a normal propaganda. At the height of the campaign, Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir wrote a post in Persian to the Iranian people, urging the overthrow of the dictator. The tweets of former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett were also very popular in the network of the hashtag. The official Israeli account in Persian language adhered to a set of connections with a cluster of accounts subsequently found to be inauthentic. In October 2025, The Citizen Lab unveiled PRISONBREAK an influence campaign by half a dozen Israel-based accounts, artificial intelligence deepfakes and posed as news outlets to provoke unrest. The operation disseminated fake videos purporting an Israeli attack on Evin Prison, as well as AI-generated ones of ATM lines to cause panic in the economy. This is not a gray area. This is state propagated narrative warfare – and it is occurring right before our eyes.
The AI Accelerant
And in case the #FreeThePersianPeople campaign is the culmination of the digital influence operation, artificial intelligence is the scaling of such operations exponentially. The entrance barrier in terms of reality production has broken down. A minimum of seven viral AI-generated videos that depicted both pro- and anti-regime protests in the recent unrest were discovered by NewsGuard and totaled to more than 3.5 million views. Off-the-shelf AI tools can be operated by one individual and used to create convincing footage demonstrating events that did not occur. The mist of war is rapidly turning into the cacophony of the slop of war as AI generated synthetic content populates the information worlds with noise endlessly as Ari Abelson of Open Origins predicted: The fog of war is soon to transform into the slop of war. When a fake video of a US carrier being sunk has 21.9 million views on X alone, the difference between reality and what reality thinks has occurred stops being relevant. Perception becomes reality.
Diplomacy or Subversion?
This leads us to the embarrassing question: Is this fair public diplomacy, or aggressive intrusion? Conventional public diplomacy interacts with the foreign populaces via culture and communication. It operates transparently. We had experienced in this campaign something that was essentially new; a campaign aimed at producing dissent, rebranding legitimate grievances into an establishment project, increasing demands on foreign military action, and using platform algorithms to produce the appearance of unanimity. Israeli authorities will claim that they are doing a moral duty to support the Iranians who want to be free. There is a gap though between cheering freedom and creating a fraudulent grass root movement with 94 percent bogus participation. The former is solidarity. The latter is mental warfare – considering the Iranian people as the means of geopolitical policy, rather than the people to talk to.
What This Means for All of Us
The #FreeThePersianPeople campaign is not a onetime event. It is a road map of future clashes. There was an establishment of a small network with 18 million users. It was credible with official Israeli involvement. The content created on AI became fact and fiction confused. Consensus was being made by platform algorithms. Suppose that were the case with your country. Outside powers who produce demonstrations over your economic discontents, advertise your exiled politicians, demand military action on your administration- and you scroll, oblivious to the fact that the “grassroots movement you are viewing is just a server farm with templated content being generated by AI generators.
The Unanswered Questions
As we observe this new type of war play out, there are a number of questions that require answers: Who regulates this? Algorithms warfare has not kept pace with the international law. The United Nations is not structured. There is nothing in the current treaties that deals with the point to which sending another state a message into its citizens veers between diplomacy and aggression. What is the duty of platforms? The current AI training policy of X, which punishes the creation of war videos without notification, was nine days late among the 21.9 million individuals who viewed that fake plane carrier sink. The damage was already created by this point, however, not to the ship itself, but to communal reality. How do we know what’s real? In case AI can create any video, any eyewitness description, what about the responsibility? What are the methods of documenting war crimes? We are creating a world where the reality is as defined by the most advanced algorithm.
Conclusion
The War of Reality. As the US and Israeli attacks escalated in February 2026, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shot a video in Persian: ‘This is a once in a generation opportunity ’The Persian account offered by the IDF said that Iranian dissidents could get in touch with the IDF in order to cooperate with it in any way. This is the new face of war. Waged not only using missiles, but using hashtags and deepfakes, algorithm manipulation, and AI-generated panic. Destruction of military targets is not the objective but dissolution of the ties of trust on which societies are bound together. The success of the #FreeThePersianPeople movement came in one very important sense, namely, proving that in the digital age, you do not need to have boots on the ground to own a country. You have simply to fill its information space. Regulate what is seen, regulate what is believed, and the land will come behind it. But there is a cost. As soon as every battle is a narrative war, every complaint is re-packaged by third parties, and even the truth is lost in battle. What becomes a real conversation then? What becomes the use of diplomacy as a pacification means? The missiles will ultimately cease to fall. However, the harm inflicted on common sense will remain even after the final bomb has dropped. You are currently fighting the war on your screen on Iran. The issue is not whether you are watching it, or not, but whether it is watching you.
Bisma Yaqoob
Bisma Yaqoob is currently pursuing her bachelor's in international relations from Fatima Jinnah Women's University, Rawalpindi. Her areas of interest are governance, public policy, and foreign policy.
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