Tehran has launched a coordinated digital influence campaign on Western social media — centered on X — designed to discredit President Donald Trump's nuclear deal and exploit political divisions inside the United States, counterterrorism experts warned Sunday. The operation, analysts say, accelerated after Trump signed a peace agreement in Versailles on June 17 and follows February U.S. strikes that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on Feb. 28.
Leaderless Regime Moves Legitimacy Contest Online
With Khamenei's successor, Mojtaba Khamenei, in hiding and Iran's senior leadership largely eliminated, the regime has redirected its power projection onto social platforms, according to Dr. Omar Mohammed of the George Washington Program on Extremism. "Iran's leadership now lives on X because it is a decapitated leadership," Mohammed told Fox News Digital. "The regime has moved its legitimacy contest onto a platform, and once you are fighting there, you optimize for it."
Mohammed identified a clear coordination pattern: identical messaging lines reposted verbatim by Iran's judiciary chief, vice president, and security council within minutes of each other. He characterized this as a central media operation manufacturing public presence for officials who can no longer appear in person, distinct from Trump's own account where, as Mohammed noted, "the account and the man are the same."
Versailles Deal Becomes Primary Target
Following the Versailles signing and the first round of negotiations in Switzerland, Trump posted on Truth Social that unfrozen Iranian assets would be released into U.S.-controlled escrow and used exclusively to purchase American agricultural products — corn, wheat, and soybeans. Iran's lead negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, responded on X by mocking the claims as "trash talks" and dismissing the agricultural framing as "GMO soybeans and broken promises."
Mohammed said the agricultural jab is precision-targeted: Trump personally sold the asset-release to American farmers as a commodity windfall, so undermining that framing directly damages the deal's domestic constituency. Tehran's strategy, he argued, treats Washington as two distinct power centers and pitches messaging calibrated to embarrass the deal Trump owns while simultaneously appealing to what the regime perceives as a rival worldview within the administration.
Two-Tier Information System Exposes Operational Design
Alp Toker of internet monitoring firm NetBlocks told Fox News Digital that Iran's regime has learned to combine social media, artificial intelligence, and domestic internet censorship as tools of asymmetric information warfare. Ordinary Iranian citizens remain subject to strict internet restrictions at home while the country's elite retain open access to foreign platforms — a structural asymmetry Toker called a "double-edged sword."
Mohammed said this parallel architecture — a censored domestic internet alongside an open megaphone aimed at Western audiences — is itself the clearest evidence that the campaign is an external influence operation rather than organic domestic speech. The regime, he added, produces English-language, screenshot-ready content built for Western virality: memeable contempt and civilizational framing designed to travel across American social feeds and complicate the diplomatic picture Trump is trying to sell.