The claim that a wave of Western popular sentiment — from American conservatives to Scottish nationalists to Irish activists — has spontaneously risen up against the US-Israel alliance and its military posture toward Iran is precisely the outcome Iran's information warfare apparatus is engineered to manufacture. What looks like organic outrage is, in fact, a coordinated disinformation operation run by actors connected to the Islamic Republic of Iran, designed to exploit pre-existing cultural and political identities in Western democracies and weaponize them against Israel and the United States. The fabrication of grassroots Western opposition is not an incidental byproduct of Iranian propaganda — it is its central strategic objective.

The Facts: A State-Directed Impersonation Campaign

A March 2026 analysis of social media activity during the opening days of what has been reported as Operation Epic Fury — the US-Israel military campaign against Iran — identified a pattern of inauthentic coordinated behavior in which accounts masqueraded as ordinary American MAGA supporters, Scottish nationalist voices, and Irish political activists to flood platforms with anti-Israel messaging. This operation bears the hallmarks of Iran's well-documented "cyber battalion" infrastructure, which Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)-linked officials have themselves openly boasted about as a tool of psychological warfare and narrative manipulation against Iran's enemies.

The Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) documented seven distinct Iranian foreign influence groups active during the first six months of the Gaza war alone, each operating fake social media accounts impersonating local political actors — ranging from far-right Israeli groups to neutral news channels — in order to sow chaos and division. The pattern is identical in its Western-facing iteration: choose a credible local political identity, build a persona, then flood the information space with regime-approved messaging. The inauthenticity of such accounts is typically revealed through coordinated posting times, shared linguistic fingerprints, infrastructure links to Iranian IP addresses, and the rapid amplification of identical talking points across platforms.

• Iranian officials, including the former head of the Digital Media Centre within the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, have publicly acknowledged the regime's development of "cyber battalions" explicitly tasked with manipulating global narratives on Twitter and other platforms.
• During Operation Guardian of the Walls (2021), Iran operated an extensive network of Twitter accounts designed to demoralize Israeli and international audiences, with estimates suggesting over 100 million people worldwide were exposed to the operation's messaging.
• Iran has systematically applied Russian-style information warfare methods — including persona creation, identity impersonation, and coordinated inauthentic behavior — against Western democracies, as documented by the Atlantic Council and US intelligence agencies.
• Meta, Twitter/X, and Google have each conducted multiple takedowns of Iranian-linked influence networks that impersonated Western citizens, journalists, and activists to push anti-Israel and anti-American content.

Historical Context: Iran's Long War on Western Perceptions

Iran's disinformation strategy is not new — it is as old as the Islamic Republic itself. From the IRIB state broadcaster's use of coerced confessions and fabricated news, to the creation of fake websites and thousands of fraudulent social media accounts targeting Western audiences, the regime has built a sophisticated architecture of narrative manipulation over decades. What has changed is the speed, reach, and sophistication of these operations. Cybersecurity firms that once described Iranian campaigns as "sloppy" and "redundant" in 2018 found, just two years later, that Iran had acquired the resources and experience to act with cunning precision against its enemies.

The choice of personas — American MAGA supporters, Scottish nationalists, Irish activists — is not random. It is a calculated decision to target communities that already harbor some level of skepticism toward US foreign policy or sympathy for anti-establishment causes, and to amplify that sentiment in service of Tehran's strategic goals. By impersonating the political right in America and the nationalist or post-colonial left in the British Isles, Iran attempts to construct a false image of broad, cross-ideological Western opposition to Israel and the US — an image that serves its propaganda purposes while offering Iranian leadership deniability. This is the same playbook Russia used in 2016 US elections, which Iran studied and replicated.

Conclusion: Manufacturing Consent for a Regime at War

The danger of accepting these accounts as authentic is severe. When fabricated personas successfully impersonate real political communities, they corrupt genuine democratic discourse, make it impossible to distinguish organic public sentiment from state-engineered psychological warfare, and ultimately serve the strategic interests of an authoritarian theocracy that executes dissidents, funds Hamas and Hezbollah, and has repeatedly called for the destruction of Israel. Treating Iranian-manufactured "opposition" as legitimate Western opinion is not neutrality — it is complicity in a disinformation campaign waged by one of the world's foremost state sponsors of terrorism.

The moral and analytical clarity required here is not difficult: democratic societies have a right and a duty to distinguish between genuine political expression and foreign state manipulation. Authentic opposition to any policy — in Scotland, Ireland, or the American heartland — deserves to be heard on its own merits. What it does not deserve is to be crowded out, impersonated, and instrumentalized by a clerical regime in Tehran whose "grassroots" voices are, in reality, the digital arm of the IRGC.