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‘Shock and share’: Iran makes social media a key front in war against America

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by Laura Kelly - 05/02/26 5:00 PM ET

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by Laura Kelly - 05/02/26 5:00 PM ET

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Sassy comebacks, sarcastic insults and glossy AI-generated videos have all been key tools in Iran’s retaliation against the United States, as social media has become a key front in the more than two-month war.

The battle playing out online demonstrates the Islamic Republic’s investment in communications and technology as a key part of its arsenal. The purpose, according to some experts, is to flood the information space with content that undermines the U.S. position and President Trump.

“Sharp power is kind of purposely trying to destabilize your opponent by making them look bad, or by using their own systems against them,” said Priya Doshi, the Hurst senior professorial lecturer in strategic communications with American University.

The videos and pithy comments also serve as a response to the Trump administration’s social media campaign employed at the beginning of the war. The campaign used AI-generated videos glorifying attacks against Iran with video game montages and splicing together American war movies and pop culture images. Those videos drew backlash in the U.S. for trivializing the costs of war.

“This administration has done a lot of unconventional things on social media,” Doshi added. “What the Iranians are doing is, they’re basically taking that and they’re turning it around and aiming it back at the United States.”

The videos and social media “clapbacks” posted on Iranian embassy accounts demonstrate a grasp of American culture and the provocative language popular on the internet.

Iran’s embassy in Thailand seized on a clip that seemed to show Trump falling asleep at the Resolute Desk during a press availability in the Oval Office. Iran’s embassy in Ghana then published a Lego version of the clip.

“He must be dreaming that he defeated Iran. Leave him sleeping,” the account posted.

After Trump announced a unilateral extension of the ceasefire, Iran’s embassy in Hyderabad, India, posted an AI-generated video depicting a frustrated Trump pretending to negotiate with an absent Iranian delegation to the tune of light-hearted carnival music.

“It goes from shock and awe, to shock and share,” said Joseph Bodnar, senior research manager at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. Bodnar, along with his colleague, analyst Krysia Sikora, is tracking a “dramatic increase” in online engagement with Iran’s diplomatic accounts.

In the first 50 days of the war, posts from official Iranian government accounts have collectively gained 900 million views and 22 million likes, according to Sikora and Bodnar’s research.

This represents a thirtyfold increase in likes compared to the preceding 50 days and “arguably Iran’s most notable win in the war thus far,” though others may point to its stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz.

The Iranian strategy, Bodnar and Sikora assess, is to enhance Tehran’s position by undermining, belittling and mocking the Trump administration.

“It’s crucial that online audiences remember that Iran is a totalitarian country that has a lot of human rights abuses,” Sikora said. “There’s complications on both sides and propaganda should not hide the facts of war and the conflict.”

The battle for influence playing out online is the result of careful investment by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), said Matin Mirramezani, project manager for Stanford University’s Iran 2040 project.

The U.S. designated the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization in 2019. It’s the primary military force defending the regime of the Islamic Republic and is responsible for carrying out intense repression inside Iran and its military activities abroad.

This includes funding for proxy armed forces across the Middle East — like Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and the Houthis in Yemen — and carrying out attacks across the world.

In 2016, the IRGC established a center for digital warfare and assigned the deputy to the chief of the IRGC as the center’s director.

“That’s a big deal in and of itself,” Mirramezani said, “and the core goal was to essentially engage in this media front, to engage in this kind of soft war or soft power struggle.”

The center is called the Qorb-e Baqiat-Allah (QBA) Headquarters.

In 2023, Mirramezani said that the Iranian government’s general budget provided roughly $55 million to the QBA, which came to three times more than the spending lines for the IRGC’s main planning and construction ministry, called the Khatam-al-Anbiya Headquarters. That minis