Mourners participate in a procession during the funeral of Iran's national security chief Ali Larijani, Basij commander Gholamreza Soleimani and Iranian sailors killed in recent strikes, in Tehran on March 18, 2026.ATTA KENARE/AFP/Getty Images
Gus Carlson is a U.S.-based columnist for The Globe and Mail.
Propaganda has been an integral part of war strategy for a long time – from Joseph Goebbels’s use of film and radio to promote Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party doctrine in the Second World War to Hanoi Hannah’s daily radio broadcasts of anti-American commentary and songs meant to demoralize U.S. troops in Vietnam.
Now, Iran has embraced new technology for its own disinformation push and is using artificial intelligence to create a false narrative that Iran is winning the war with the U.S. and Israel.
The question around the new-tech propaganda is this: Does anyone believe it? The answer is, it probably depends on what side of the conflict you are on.
While Iran has come a long way from choppy videos with soundtracks comically out of sync with the images that were circulated during the Twelve-Day War in June, 2025, the country’s latest AI propaganda efforts are still embarrassingly flawed.
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Exhibit A is a recent AI-generated video spread by Iranian sources suggesting Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was dead. The video was widely distributed on social media and picked up by Iranian media outlets across the country.
But even a cursory look at the images by non-experts revealed it was hardly authentic. Mr. Netanyahu was shown with six fingers on one hand, an obvious sign that the images were AI-generated.
To make fun of the farce – and prove the effort false – a few days later Mr. Netanyahu posted a proof-of-life selfie on social media showing him at a Jerusalem coffee shop, smiling with a cup of coffee in one hand and holding up his other hand to the camera.
The image proved two things: Mr. Netanyahu was very much alive, and he had the regulation number of fingers.
The video was posted on Benjamin Netanyahu's Facebook page, responding to viral posts claiming he'd been killed, which were followed by posts speculating that footage of him had been AI edited because he looked to have six fingers.
The Associated Press
In another instance, Iranian state media posted images showing a hale and hearty new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, after reports circulated that he was too injured to make a public appearance. The photos were also posted to his X account. The BBC later reported that the photos were AI-altered and could not be considered reliable evidence about the leader’s state of health.
“They can’t win on the battlefield, so they’re going to try and win through AI and through a global narrative,” Bridget Bean, former acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said of the Iranian efforts in a Fox News interview last week. “Their goal is to weaken our will, our resolve and to really push a narrative that is not true.”
While those two initiatives backfired on Iran, AI-generated propaganda, when done well, could be an incredibly powerful tool for social and cultural manipulation.
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And that’s a critical part of war. Maintaining the morale of the population is a pivotal component of keeping and exercising power. So is damaging the morale of the attackers, especially in an extended conflict that may eventually entail boots on the ground.
In the same way Hanoi Hannah tried to demoralize enemy troops by reading daily lists of American G.I.’s killed and imprisoned, telling them the war was unjust and immoral, and playing U.S. anti-war pop songs, even flawed images of a dead Israeli prime minister and a healthy Iranian supreme leader could boost the morale of Iranians under attack.
And in the same way the Goebbels campaigns depicting the might of the Third Reich and the resolve of its leader created a frenzy of pro-Nazi sentiment across Germany, propaganda painting a rosy picture of Iranian victory over its attackers, no matter how untrue, is a powerful motivational tonic.
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When bombs are falling and hope seems lost, it’s not a stretch to believe that Iranians would cling to such images as life preservers, even if they were eventually proved false.
Besides, Ms. Bean said, people scrolling quickly on their hand-held phones might not notice that something is wonky about the regime’s AI-generated content, and she urged people to be “careful about what’s happening.”
P.T. Barnum suggested there’s a sucker born every minute, a well-worn adage about the gullibility of people. When the chips are down, as they are in Iran, maybe people are willing suckers, eager to grab onto positive messages and images no matter how obviously flawed they may be. In wartime, altered reality can become a useful reality.