A report in the Israeli Haaretz newspaper has resurfaced that showed Israel have been using AI deep-fakes and other disinformation to create the supposed push for the restoration of the Pahlavi monarchy in Iran.
US administration and media, eagerly supported by their enablers in the UK and other Western states, have been pushing claims of a widespread popular uprising and of violence by the Islamic Republic government to repress it. Trump has threatened to attack Iran if protesters are killed, creating a pretext for him to grant Israel’s wish for renewed US military aggression against its main resistance.
AI: a two-headed motorcycle ‘cop’.
Israel AI allegations
But the claims have been based on disinformation and, in many cases, AI-generated images and footage – including, notably, a two-headed ‘policeman’ and an apparent AI fake of women lighting cigarettes with an image of Ayatollah Khamenei. Audio in old footage of anti- and pro-government demos has been replaced to suggest it shows new anti-government protests.
I asked Elon Musk’s Grok, 3 times, for the source of this photo and 3 times it refused to tell me. I believe it to be either taken outside of Iran or edited with AI or both.
- No ash on the ground
- Photo on the ground has English writing on it
- They don’t look like Iranians https://t.co/9JkpYuvGsA pic.twitter.com/0ae96OR1jR
— Citizen Journalists (@citizenjournos_) January 10, 2026
Israeli accounts are even using (clearly fake) AI videos showing monarchists and Israelis celebrating together at the anticipated fall of the Islamic Republic:
That’s what they (global bullies) do when they’re desperate for regime change. People haven’t forgotten the 1970s, SAVAK and Papa Pahlavi’s torture police. Any monarchist protest is a Zionist sponsored fake. pic.twitter.com/sJx92yr3Ic
— Mesocricetus Incognitus (@RattusIncognito) January 2, 2026
By contrast, apparently real footage shows small groups of anti-government protesters being shouted down by larger pro-government demos:
| BIG: Unprecedented reactions that did not exist before
3-4 girls were chanting anti-Iran slogans when all the other students stopped them and started waving Iranian flags and say:
“Uneducated student who’s puppeted by the Mossad!” pic.twitter.com/GTYdCu6nGH
— Arya – آریا (@AryJeay) December 31, 2025
Intelligence agencies involved
Former CIA director Mike Pompeo’s new year X post had already confirmed that Israel’s Mossad was involved in instigating and coordinating street protests. But Haaretz’s October 2025 report pre-dates the protests and the Western media and social media mass propaganda campaign around them. It pre-dates the 2026 push to restore Reza Pahlavi, the son of the deposed and disgraced, CIA-installed shah. And it does so very usefully.
The Haaretz article was written on the occasion of Pahlavi’s visit to Israel in autumn 2025. As is frequently the case, Israeli ‘mainstream’ media are a lot more honest about political context than their Western counterparts. Haaretz notes that Pahlavi’s support is limited to those who left Iran to escape the 1979 revolution – and why:
While Pahlavi enjoys some popularity among the Iranian expat community, it’s far from clear that Iranians want him as a leader. The son of a former dictator who enjoyed Israeli and American patronage, he carries the political baggage of his father, whose rule was known not only for its openness to Western culture but also for corruption, political repression and the torture of regime opponents.
As with Cuban exiles in the US – and indeed Pahlavi himself – this is hardly a surprise. They were the ones who lost out to a popular uprising. They want what’s ‘theirs’ back.
Extensive campaign
Haaretz points out that Pahlavi claims that he has a lot of support on social media for his restoration and for his visit to Israel. But then it adds where that ‘support’ comes from [emphasis added]:
When asked about the responses he was getting to his visit to Israel, Iran’s archenemy, he said reactions had been largely positive. He also referred reporters to his social media accounts.
“Don’t take my word for it, search on social media … on Twitter, Instagram, any platform,” he said. “If you do the research yourself, you don’t need to ask me the question. The answer is right before your eyes.”
Pahlavi’s answer is particularly noteworthy in light of the findings by Haaretz and TheMarker, Haaretz’s business newspaper. It turns out that a large-scale digital influence campaign in Persian was underway, operated out of Israel and funded by a private entity that receives government support.
The campaign promotes Pahlavi’s public image and amplifies calls for restoring the monarchy. The campaign relies on “avatars,” fake online personas posing as Iranian citizens on social media. They were first discovered by social media researchers in Israel and abroad.
The campaign was not limited to Pahlavi’s visit to Israel – and spread across multiple platforms, aiming to influence Israeli politics as well as international [emphasis added]:
the campaign included fake accounts on platforms such as X and Instagram and used artificial intelligence tools to help disseminate key narratives, craft its messages and generate content. According to two of the sources, there were also efforts to amplify the posts of Pahlavi’s ally in Israel, Gamliel, a minister from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party.
Given that the operation was indirectly funded by taxpayer money and designed to serve Israel’s geopolitical interests, some of the people involved were uncomfortable with the pressure to use the campaign to promote the minister, two sources said.
Parts of this network and its accounts were already exposed by Haaretz. Sources linked the campaign to the network of pro-Pahlavi accounts first detected by independent social media researchers Nitsan Yasur and Gil Feldman, and first reported by Haaretz’s Bar Peleg. At the time, the effort was described as an apparent foreign-influence operation. The target audience was unclear due to posts that seemed to promote the minister.
But the sources stressed that the campaign only looked foreign – its origins were in Israel.
Tellingly, Gamliel’s own AI-generated social media output gave a hint of the 2026 campaign:
Snapshot of an AI-generated by Gamliel, Netanyahu and his wife, according to Haaretz.
Exposed
Information warfare detection experts Citizen Lab conducted other research cited by Haaretz. This research exposed mass AI campaigns against the Islamic Republic. Citizen Lab’s pedigree includes detecting and exposing the notorious Israel ‘Pegasus’ software. Israel and its clients used Pegasus to spy on journalists, politicians, human rights activists, judges and others – and the Saudi government used it in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
The Lab’s findings showed a much wider campaign, one clearly connected to the Israeli regime [emphasis added]:
Alongside the network found by the Israeli reporters, Citizen Lab has discovered another pro-Israel, Persian-language influence campaign, being revealed Friday in a report published in tandem with the investigation by TheMarker and Haaretz.
This campaign included dozens of fake accounts pushing out AI-generated content, which Citizen Lab researchers assess is very likely operated by the Israeli government or by a contractor acting on its behalf. Their report’s conclusions are based on what the institute found to be signs of synchronization between the online campaign’s content and Israeli military actions during the 12-day war with Iran. This includes signs that the operators had prior knowledge of Israel’s attack on Iran’s infamous Evin Prison and even seemed to have prepared content in advance.
Other research corroborates [emphasis added]:
According to the sources, part of this effort is based on a network of fake accounts originating in Israel.
A social media researcher into the network that was previously exposed by Haaretz identified hundreds of suspected fake users on X promoting Pahlavi, sharing his messages and using hashtags like #KingRezaPahlavi. These were found alongside posts promoting Gamliel. Not all of the suspected avatars, of which there almost a thousand, were said to be part of the same campaign, but a much wider network was exposed.In fact, the X post that exposed the network included an AI-generated video titled “Next Year in Free Tehran” that meshed local politics with geopolitical interests and had massive exposure, most of which was likely inorganic. The video shows Netanyahu, his wife, Gamliel, her partner, Pahlavi and his wife walking through Tehran’s streets.
The video received many more views than most of the minister’s X posts, and these and other attempts to amplify it helped Israeli researchers locate a network of users exclusively promoting Iranian content. This included Gamliel’s frequent X posts about regime change in Iran and posts that publicized her ties to Pahlavi.
Haaretz elaborates:
All the accounts Citizen Lab identifies as part of the network were … inactive until kicking into action on X one after the other or even together early this year, further suggesting that they were part of an inauthentic coordinated campaign. The accounts’ activities intensified when the war with Iran broke out.
The network included fake X accounts pretending to be real users, but was also found to be connected to the X page @TelAviv_Tehran, an outlet of sorts. Fake users linked to the campaign amplified the page’s content, including AI videos produced exclusively by it.
Among the videos generated was a clip of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei as Hitler, based on the famous scene from the film “Downfall” where the Nazi leader vents at his generals. The AI-generated video of Khamenei throwing a tantrum was distributed by both the @Tel Aviv_Tehran page and another account from the network, and only by them.
The most striking case linking the network of accounts to Israel is an online campaign that coincided with a real-world campaign: the Israeli strike on infamous Evin Prison, which houses Iranian dissidents.
And, just as with the current campaign, the AI-driven fake news tries to stir unrest directly – and, with the aid of international corporate and state news, to smear Iranian officials as fleeing, to embolden anti-government actors:
The campaign also tried to piggyback on an authentic protest by Iranians [by] calling for people to go to their balconies at 8 P.M. and shout “Death to Khamenei” and “Death to the dictator.” Accounts in the pro-Israel network joined together to amplify the message … For example, accounts distributed fake videos … while adopting hashtags identified with the real protest…
The researchers determined that the pro-Israel campaign also included a fake news report and a deepfake video of an Iranian singer performing a protest song. For example, the network distributed a screenshot of a fake BBC Persian story about senior Iranian officials fleeing the country; BBC Persian confirmed that it had never published the story.
A Jerusalem Post headline from the 2026 disinformation campaign. Corporate ‘news’ outlets across the ‘west’ ran similar headlines at the same time.
Reach
This ongoing campaign is not a one-off, or limited to Iran. Immediately after Trump’s illegal abduction of Venezuela’s president and his wife, US figures and an army of bots and ‘sock puppets’ amplified video of ‘Venezuelan citizens’ tearfully thanking Donald Trump for his attempted regime change. But the video was fake, generated by AI:
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It’s often said that the first casualty of war is truth. That also applies to information war, especially when the US or Israel – habitual liars with no truth to back their aims – are involved. But UK politicians and ‘mainstream’ media are no better; even Israeli media is more honest. They are all too eager to engage in and amplify this disinformation and don’t even need the excuse of war or regime change.
The only antidote to disinformation is good information. Find your reliable sources and amplify them; scrutinise every claim for authenticity. We are many and they are few.
Featured image via the Canary
By Skwawkbox
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