So it's interesting to me that you say it's not so, maybe not the most convincing of, uh, in terms of what they're putting out around the Supreme Leader, these fake images and such.

I would say that the stakes [laughs] around the Supreme Leader aren't that high.

So again, it goes back to who they're trying to convince and what they're trying to accomplish.

If you're a diehard fan and supporter of the regime, you're either going to blindly believe anything, or your belief or following is staked on something other than ideology, like economic interests, for example.

So I think it really depends on the context we're talking about, and of course, the fact that there really isn't one source behind all of this, these different kind of disinformation campaigns or even, like, hacking campaigns.

Iran very famously contracts out a lot of its cyber efforts, so it's often very hard to Attribute or even document all the wide arraying efforts that are maintained throughout the different institutions affiliated with the state.

So there's that element of it, and of course, it's not quite as black and white as some of it is sophisticated, some of it isn't.

What are they trying to do? I mean, are they trying to shape positive sentiment towards the regime? I, I, I mean, what is the ultimate point of, of all these different ways by which they're trying to shape understanding of who they are and what they do?

This is a, a, I'm gonna say a, a really messed up sentence, but I think the, that initial post on the 21st and then Trump broadcasting it on Truth Social is maybe when some of this... people start paying attention to some of these things, if that makes sense.

Right.

Yeah.

So I mean, that day, um, when he does post, um, it's in the middle of, you know, the ceasefire negotiations that are going on between the US and Iran.

And throughout this whole conflict, there has been this narrative, you know, both from Israel and the US, that, you know, the human rights of Iranians, the freedom of Iranians is part of the story.

It's part of why the conflict is happening.

And I mean, I think we all know, given the human rights situation in both these respected countries, that human rights isn't [laughs] often central, and it's a little bit, um, insincere to consider that they would care about the human rights of Iranians or Iranian protesters, but this has been very central to the narrative.

And B, Iran has been very good at or very effective at blacking out the internet and cutting off everyone from the wider world, right? Can you walk us through like how the Iranian regime controls the internet, what the blackouts are like? And I'm also, if you can get into it a little bit, like the history of it, like how long has this been going on? Was this, when they saw the internet coming, did they kind of set it up this way?

Um-

Um-What we have been seeing is a prevalence of, you know, typical war propaganda now being mobilized in deceptive ways by Israel, by Islamic Republic of Iran to kind of promote their narratives.

Uh, we've of course, seen a lot of different examples of, you know, the Iranian state and affiliated social media accounts of like state broadcasters show deceptive AI-generated images of them attacking US bases in the region that were fake or widely exaggerated.

We've seen different types of content also come from, uh, Israeli sources showing certain things that don't exist, like, uh, AI-generated images of military personnel and military equipment within schools.

The thing that has been most corrosive, however, has been the fact that not that we have this much content, which of course is a massive load on fact-checkers.

The most corrosive aspect that we're seeing, it's the doubt that we have been seeing proliferate, the fact that it's very hard for people to trust what they see and what they believe.

We have this kind of information environment in Iran, which is probably this laboratory of some of the worst excesses that you can see of, you know, information pollution, which is largely created by the fact that you have decades of information controls, media controls by the regime.

So then how does the use of AI-generated imagery blur that line between psychological warfare and traditional battlefield reporting in the Iran war?

What happened next?

The next day, the first day of the war, there was a tragic incident where we now know it was a US bomb that hit an elementary school in Manab.

The death toll is somewhere around 170, and the majority of the 170 were children.

I remember getting disinformation in all the group chats and networks I was in about this bombing.

I was first told, "No, this was the IRGC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards bombed the school." This is from Iranians.

And I remember looking the story up and seeing actually the debunked AI photo from Isfahan linked because everyone was saying, "Well, it's a legitimate military target.

It's understandable it was hit." So this just added layers to the confusion in the information space.

Explain the ambivalence.

Give me a quick view of where the good information is coming from as we speak.

We have some really incredible social media accounts that have been doing very quiet work of citizen documentation.

There's one Twitter account called Vahid Online.

It's an anonymous account, and for years, it's been sharing protest footage.

It's believed to be one person, and this one person does say, like, "I'm not able to do fact-checking.

I can't verify everything.

I'm just sharing what I have." He puts it out, and I know there's different fact-checking efforts, like BBC Verify exists, various different fact-checking organizations, and they take this content from his account and other social media and document it.

But, uh, how do you reimagine it? What are the mechanisms whereby you could rebuild it in a way that would resist government control?