In the hours before Israeli forces bombed Evin prison in Iran’s capital on June 23, posts appeared on social media in Persian, foreshadowing the attack and urging Iranians to come free the prisoners.
Moments after the bombs struck, a video appeared on X and Telegram, purporting to show a blast at an entrance to the prison, which is notorious for holding political prisoners. One post on X included a hashtag, in Persian: “#freeevin.”
The attack on the prison was real, but the posts and video were not what they seemed. They were part of an Israeli ruse, according to researchers who tracked the effort.
“It’s certainly a new era of influence warfare,” said James J.F. Forest, a professor of security studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, who has written extensively on the subject. “There’s never really been a previous corollary in history where you had the ability to go to scale with this kind of propaganda.”
Darren L. Linvill, a co-director of Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, said the video purporting to show a blast at Evin prison appeared almost immediately on accounts on X and Telegram and then spread on a coordinated network of inauthentic accounts that pushed anti-Iranian content, reaching millions of people. He called it a striking example of “the coordination between kinetic and psychological warfare.”
It has actually been covered
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/technology/israel-iran-psychological-warfare.html