SouthernWorldwide.com – Experts have revealed that Iran has initiated a new strategy on Western social media, launching a covert influence campaign designed to manipulate Americans and undermine President Donald Trump’s efforts to secure a nuclear deal.
This development follows U.S. strikes in Iran that significantly impacted its leadership and the subsequent signing of an interim memorandum of understanding between Tehran and Washington. Analysts suggest that Iranian officials are increasingly relying on digital proxies to assert centralized control.
“The regime has moved its legitimacy contest onto a platform, and once you are fighting there, you optimize for it,” explained Mohammed of the George Washington Program on Extremism.
He elaborated, “There are English, screenshot-ready lines, memeable contempt and civilizational pride. It is adaptation under pressure — an influence operation forced by the fact that the men running Iran can no longer stand at a podium.”
The elimination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on February 28th, along with the majority of the regime’s senior leadership, has led to the new leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, operating in hiding. Mohammed stated that Iran’s digital messaging has consequently become more centralized.
“The coordination between the leadership is visible: You watch the same lines reposted verbatim by the judiciary chief, the vice president and the security council within minutes,” the expert noted.
“That is a central media shop pushing copy, not officials independently moved by the same spirit at the same moment. And the register gives it away.”
Mohammed believes that the regime’s accounts on X (formerly Twitter) are acting as a manufactured proxy for the leadership vacuum. This strategy also exploits existing political divisions within the United States, a tactic that became more pronounced after Trump signed a new peace deal on June 17 in Versailles.
“Tehran is not aiming at the United States as a single entity,” Mohammed asserted.
“It reads Washington as two power centers and pitches to both — working to embarrass the deal the president owns while speaking the language of multipolarity back to the worldview it attributes to the vice president.”
Following the signing of the deal and the initial round of negotiations in Switzerland, Trump announced on Truth Social that unfrozen Iranian assets would be used to purchase American agricultural products, including soybeans, wheat, and corn.
He specified that the Treasury Department would release these assets into an escrow account, controlled by the U.S., for the exclusive purchase of food and medical supplies from the United States, benefiting American farmers.
However, posts from Iran’s lead negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, dismissed these claims as “trash talks.”
“America falsely claims our unfrozen assets will buy their agriculture. Interesting. The only crop we’re harvesting is what you planted: decades of mistrust. It’s organic, abundant, and homegrown. But apparently the U.S. only exports GMO soybeans, broken promises and trash talks,” Ghalibaf wrote on X.
“The agriculture jab is aimed straight at Trump, who personally sold the frozen-assets release to American farmers as a corn-and-soybean windfall, so mocking ‘GMO soybeans and broken promises’ is built to embarrass the deal he owns,” Mohammed explained.
“Tehran gains if it can discredit the deal the president is selling,” he added.
“That is also not a 64-year-old Iranian speaker writing for himself; that is a young social media team writing in his name,” Mohammed pointed out.
Mohammed contrasted this with Trump’s posts, stating that the “account and the man the same.”
“The Iranian accounts are the reverse. They come from an institution manufacturing a public presence for a leadership that can no longer appear in person,” he concluded.
While ordinary Iranian citizens face stringent internet restrictions within their own country, Tehran’s elite reportedly enjoy unrestricted access to foreign platforms to target Western audiences.
“These regimes are learning to combine social media, AI and internet censorship as tools for asymmetric information warfare, benefiting from a global audience while sidestepping accountability to their own citizens,” Mohammed observed.
“There is a two-tier system in which government officials can use the platform freely to promote their agenda while denying access to their citizens, as they do in Iran.
“It’s a double-edged sword — you get more open politics at the cost of regime propagandization.
“Iranian authorities, among others, are getting better at gaming this system,” added Toker.
Mohammed highlighted that these parallel systems—a heavily censored internet domestically and an “open megaphone” directed at Western audiences—provide the strongest indication that the campaign is an external influence operation, rather than spontaneous domestic expression.
