Tapping into America’s distaste for forever wars: The spread of Iranian narratives on Bluesky

The United States and Israel have made battlefield gains in their conflict against Iran, but the United States is struggling to counter Iranian propaganda. Operational successes have removed Iran’s authoritarian supreme leader, dismantled its defense leadership apparatus, and degraded its missile capabilities. However, the opportunity cost of military success for the United States is the loss of ground in the information war for the hearts and minds of American audiences and Western audiences more broadly. While Iran is losing on the battlefield, it is competing effectively in the information space through an aggressive, multiplatform disinformation campaign.

Analysis by the Futures Lab of more than 9,000 Bluesky Social posts finds that messages seemingly designed to exacerbate public divisions, which compose 23 percent of posts in the dataset, are the highest performing, averaging 150 reposts, 470 likes and 28 replies per post. These same posts have been viewed by an estimated 293,666 users and are statistically significantly associated with a higher sharing volume, with an estimated 41 percent increase compared to other posts. In addition, network and association analysis identifies 19 core accounts spreading Iranian war narratives and finds them to be active in 15 communities, with 11 communities estimated to be relying heavily on a singular account and 3 communities interacting with more than a single account.

Iran’s disinformation playbook has successfully targeted Israel in prior conflicts with Hamas and Hezbollah. Following the October 7 attacks, Microsoft reported that Iran increased cyber operations against Israel. Moreover, Iranian influence operations rose from roughly six in 2021 to eleven in October 2023 alone, and Iranian actors repeatedly reused old footage while falsely presenting it as Israeli attacks. As a result of this, Meta reportedly closed Iran-linked accounts that pushed narratives on religious divisions within Israel, liberal and conservative critiques of Israel’s war with Hamas, and criticism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in likely efforts to inflame tensions within Israel. Following the 2025 U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, narratives from Iranian accounts generated over 126,000 engagements and an estimated 224 million views. Now Iran’s disinformation machine appears to be targeting Western audiences to undermine support for the U.S.-Israeli conflict with the Iranian regime.

Read more at Center for Strategic and International Studies