Before the dust had settled on the ruins of the Shajareh Tayyebeh school — a casualty of the recent U.S.-Israel military strikes against Iran, and one which resulted in the deaths of up to 168 adults and children — people were already engagement-farming online. Clips of digital flight simulators were passed off as real-time ops footage, while out-of-context images of battleships and old videos of aerial missile attacks were repurposed to sell users a tale of Iranian dominance. AI-edited content proliferated.
According to experts, the posts had accumulated hundreds of millions of views in just a handful of days.
The growing number of viral posts — and the potential for even more to pop up as users earned cash for the viral falsehoods — was alarming enough to prompt X to edit its policies on misinformation. As of yesterday, X says it will suspend users from its Creator Revenue Sharing program if they post AI-generated content depicting armed conflict without labeling it as such.
And not even Google searches are safe from misinformation these days.
The proliferation of digital misinformation is the product of a web of bots and engagement farming accounts, all with the shared goal of being the loudest, most clicked-on account in the room.
Some hope to win political and social influence, others just want the money. Meanwhile, users, prone to confirmation bias and a reliance on digital news sources, repeatedly fall victim to their racket. Engagement farming, no longer just exchanging the currency of memes and clickbait, has become a dangerous, politically fraught game.
What users are seeing as the U.S.-Iran conflict rages
Recent posts engaging in active disinformation about the conflict in Iran primarily involve exaggerating the scale and success of Iranian counterattacks, experts explain.
A recent investigation by Wired documented hundreds of posts across Elon Musk’s X that included misleading footage and photos — including AI-manipulated content — or promoted false claims about the scale of the attacks, many of which were posted in the immediate aftermath of missile strikes. A post with more than 4 million views claimed to show ballistic missiles sailing over Dubai, but actually depicted an Iranian attack on Tel Aviv in Oct. 2024. Another with more than 375,000 impressions shows a fictitious before-and-after image of the shelled compound of assassinated Iranian leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei.
According to Wired, nearly all of the posts were shared by premium subscriber accounts with blue checkmarks, including state-funded media outlets in Iran.
As in previous military conflicts, accounts have also attempted to pass off video game footage as verified news clips, including AI-manipulated images of downed F-35 fighter jets ripped from flight simulator games. The images have been shared across TikTok, some with links to Russian influence operations, the BBC reported.
In addition to out-of-context footage and misleading content, the BBC also documented a handful of completely AI-generated videos that had amassed nearly 100 million total views, shared by what the outlet calls notorious “super-spreaders” of disinformation.
Visuals are a good way for us to process what is going on in war when we can’t comprehend the scale of these conflicts.
A report from misinformation watchdog NewsGuard also chronicled a cadre of users sharing viral posts circulating false claims of targeted military strikes against U.S. and Israeli strongholds, predominately using repurposed video footage and out of context or completely recontextualized images of destruction.
“[These videos] are posted by anonymous accounts that tend to report on geopolitical conflicts. These are accounts that are known to NewsGuard for spreading exaggerated claims, usually from a pro-Iran perspective,” said Sofia Rubinson, senior editor of NewsGuard’s Reality Check newsletter and co-author of the report. From there, Rubinson explains, other accounts with larger followings pick up and spread the false claims.
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For example, hours after initial reports of the U.S.’s military strikes in Iran, users on X began reposting an image of a sinking naval aircraft carrier. Users claimed that it showed a recent attack on the battleship USS Abraham Lincoln in the Arabian Sea. The U.S. military’s Central Command issued a statement refuting the claim that same day. NewsGuard confirmed the image actually showed the intentional sinking of the USS Oriskany that took place nearly 20 years ago. The claim was shared by unverified “news” accounts and even Kenyan parliamentary member Peter Salasya. Salasya’s post has been viewed more than 6 million times.
Multiple accounts, including Salasya’s, shared another video allegedly showing Israel’s Dimona nuclear power plant under siege by air. The video racked up hundreds of thousands of impressions across anti-Israel and pro-Iran pages — an X Community Note now appears below the video on Salasya’s page, clarifying the images are of a March 2017 attack in Balaklia, Ukraine.
NewsGuard found that such posts have already garnered at least 21.9 million views across X.
Posts inducing fear of domestic retaliatory attacks have also circulated online, including an unverified list of U.S. cities alleged to be top targets for Iranian sleeper cells — the list appears to have been written in Apple’s Notes app.
Disinformation is only going to get worse
The acceleration of advanced generative AI and relaxed moderation policies across social media platforms has exacerbated an online misinformation crisis, experts have warned.
Particularly over recent months, including during the U.S.-led capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, NewsGuard researchers have noticed a pattern in online disinformation emerging over periods of breaking news.
“People now have a shorter window for the lapse between an event occurring and authentic visuals coming out of the media,” explained Rubinson. To put it more bluntly: Users are losing their patience, used to an online environment where information is usually right at your fingertips.
These brief periods, or voids, between breaking news reports and confirmed video or photos become fertile ground for disinformation bots and engagement farmers, Rubinson says. They also threaten to reinforce conspiratorial thinking — that mainstream news outlets are keeping information from the public, for example — and lend themselves to a user’s own confirmation bias.
Political conflict is particularly rife for the spreading of such misinformation, which is in turn strengthened by active disinformation campaigns from both sides of armed conflict. Researchers have found that a lack of proximity to events makes it easier to believe out of context or exaggerated information.
“It’s an attempt to fill this fog of war,” said Rubsinson. “It can be very overwhelming for people. They want to make sense of it, and visuals are a good way for us to process what is going on in war when we can’t comprehend the scale of these conflicts.”
This becomes a greater problem as individuals increasingly use social media platforms as sole sources for news and as previously reliable fact-checking tools, including straightforward Google searches, become more unreliable.
AI is harming more than helping
AI chatbots and search have become embedded into the very fiber of real world crisis events, as users turn to them real time fact checkers. Rubinson said that nearly every X post NewsGuard analyzed included the same reply: “@Grok is this true?”
But AI assistants and platform chatbots, including X’s Grok, are notoriously unreliable at disseminating and verifying breaking news. They are also inconsistent at applying their own platforms’ moderation policies. The BBC found that Grok erroneously verified recent AI-generated images depicting Iranian military movements, for example.
According to a second report by NewsGuard published March 3, Google AI-powered Search Summaries have repeated misleading claims about the U.S.-Iran conflict when prompted with reverse image searches. For example, NewsGuard researchers uploaded a frame from a video shared online claiming to show the destruction of a CIA outpost in Dubai. Google’s AI summary verified the story, writing: “The image shows a fire at a high-rise residential building in Dubai, UAE, reportedly occurring on March 1, 2026, following regional tensions. … Conflicting reports emerged regarding the cause, with some sources mentioning a drone strike and others referring to the building as a specific intelligence facility.”
The video actually depicts a 2015 residential fire in the city of Sharjah.
Security experts have sounded alarm bells over such “AI information threats,” including AI tools used to generate and amplify misleading content. A report by the UK Centre for Emerging Technology and Security suggests the worsening information environment may pose existential threats to public safety, national security, and democracy without direct intervention.
Meanwhile, civilians and journalists on the ground in Iran are fighting back against a near total internet blackout, following a massive push by the Trump administration and its ally Elon Musk to get Starlink internet connections to those on the ground. Bad actors, on the other hand, are still finding their way through the block and back onto sites like X.
