The US/Israel-Iran Conflict: How Digital Messaging Is Shaping Narratives – Analysis

To maintain control of his vast empire, Alexander the Great was the first to recognize the power of messaging. He deployed symbols-driven propaganda to remind his subjects where real power resided. Communication activities – aiming to inform, influence, gain legitimacy and support of foreign publics – have been an integral part of history. During battles, strategic communication gained even more traction, aiming to conquer both territories and minds of the people by influencing perceptions – acting as a precursor to modern propaganda. 

While propaganda was employed both aggressively and extensively during the two World Wars, subsequently, digital messaging through public diplomacy (PD) developed as a distinct strategic tool of persuasion for building relational bonds between nations. Overtime, the unprecedented growth in the scope and speed of communication technologies pushed further the boundaries of traditional PD (Manor 2019). While the foreign public continued to be the target of digital PD, the domestic public equally became a focus for digital messaging. 

The current military conflict between the US, Israel and Iran have been witnessing the public consuming an overload of propaganda materials. Whether in the US or Iran, social media algorithms, entertainment formats and AI-generated content are being leveraged to shape public opinion (PO) and behavior. 

Digital messaging, which has emerged a powerful form of propaganda – enhanced by infotainment – not only aids in propagating official versions to the wider range of public but also helps to cement political power. It captures public attention and enhances the leaders’ legitimacy while pushing distinct narratives for placing states as central actors on the world stage – the three foremost strategic ambitions to achieve, especially during military conflicts.

Evolving wartime messaging 

During the Second World War, both the British Broadcasting Communication and the Voice of America established the importance of messaging and the contribution of international radio broadcasting to the conduct of diplomacy, conflict resolution, and maintenance of alliance relationships in crisis conditions (Rawnsley 1996). The ICT revolution further transformed messaging during crises while increasing the noise in the mediated ecosystem by making PD more accessible and interactive. Since online platforms have the potential to involve a ‘wide audience’ in long-term, durable, and horizontal exchanges through material features that ‘shape their interest, affinity, endorsement, or support’, many contemporary leaders have been keen to utilize the social media affordances to not only push their own versions of developments but also for projecting power, notably in combat environments. 

With technologies and innovation influencing perceptions of the reality, and the processes of knowledge construction gaining traction, garnering public support has also emerged critical in today’s technology-driven wars. With its capacity to ‘dehumanize’ targets and reduce them to ‘data points’, automated warfare now requires governments to gain trust of the people for their pugnacious actions. With digital PD including a wide range of strategies and practices in international relations and foreign policy implementation by diverse actors, rallying public support across national boundaries has become a political necessity. With real-time, targeted, and highly visual communication dominating the media landscape, leaderships, institutions and political actors now craft their own ‘stories’ to shape international perceptions while seeking to capitalize on the media’s affordances for their own ends.

Leaderships and the digital appeal to engage

Digital PD has altered the way countries communicate with their audiences, often reducing politics to ‘gamification’. Ever since war broke out in the Middle East, lego-style memes, mocking the US President Donald Trump and videos, including a montage celebrating US attacks on Iran – interweaving real drone strike footage with video game clips – targeting the domestic public in Iran and the US respectively, have gone viral. It is fascinating how leaderships have transformed their political rhetoric from rational arguments towards emotional appeals aiming to catalyze public engagement, prompt favorable online user interaction and induce collective behavioral change. 

In the Digital Age, online emotional pleas are extremely important in the PD landscape. Modern leaderships prefer to bypass traditional gatekeepers to engage with the domestic and foreign public by calibrating digital appeal for building positive images and national identities, essential for winning support and legitimacy. In these contexts, online strategic communication, with its ability to touch an emotional chord, has become critical for shaping global public perceptions. The Obama administration’s efforts to deploy early affordances to foster mutual understanding and humanizing foreign cultures while facilitating public engagement is a pertinent example. Washington, under Barack Obama, had established the first virtual Embassy in Iran in 2011 for mending ties with the Iranian public post- 9/11attacks for ‘building relationships, starting from understanding other countries’ – regarded a major priority for the then presidency (Palit 2023). 

Following the US and Israel’s persistent strikes against Iran since February, the Iranian government has been retaliating, by attacking energy assets of its neighbors in the Middle East. Amidst the conflict, a defiant but empathetic Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, decided to engage with the foreign public. Utilizing social media affordances, and targeting the American and the regional public, he reached out with a tailored message. His post on X – that his country harbors no ill will to the US and neighboring countries and is only defending itself in the ongoing war – highlights that the Information Age compels even authoritarian theocratic states to ‘reach out’ for shaping a favorable global PO while mobilizing domestic support. 

The online appeal equally emphasizes how digital communication has come to reshape the dynamics of international relations, especially during heightened geopolitical tensions. The Iranian President’s use of technology for reaching out to the people, both in America and the Gulf, points out the extent to which foreign perceptions matter during conflicts with the public placed within the information network. Such digital appeals by leaders like Masoud, while underlining the aggressive harnessing of technology for direct engagement, also emphasizes the power of social media to emotionalize issues – a mechanism of influence deemed critical during international crises. Cognizant of the fact that Iran cannot take on the US military might, digital affordances can help Iran to shorten the war while carry targeted memes to demonize the US leadership.

Masoud has not been alone in wanting to engage and shape public perceptions during war times! In the last couple of years, the Ukrainian President Zelensky has time and again utilized online appeal for establishing direct connection with the international audience while attempting to secure military and humanitarian aid for Ukraine’s fight against Russia. As the Iranian and the Ukrainian cases signal, new PD – counting on digital messaging tools – is relied upon heavily by modern leaders to engage the public and shape narratives to serve their strategic objectives.

Leadership messages aim to control

Just as engagement of the domestic and international audience has become critical for authoritarian regimes in the new media landscape, control through digital intimidation has become imperative for leaders in global democracies too. Digital tools are now weaponized by leaderships to create a ‘fog of war’ to amplify psychological distress and generate fear. 

With PO posing as a new domain of warfare for achieving victory, manufactured online information are disseminated for shaping the outcomes of war. Online posts and messages are utilized to generate psychological fear, elevating the battle to the human brain. According to scholars, this new domain, while controlling information, also shapes the very biology of decision-making. The ongoing hostilities between the US, Israel and Iran fall in this category whereby leaders like Trump and Masoud weaponize affordances to communicate  ‘hostile’ messages – aiming for hegemony by colonizing thought..

The Trump administration’s PD-driven messages have not only centered on narratives of ‘preemptive’ defense against Iran’s imminent attacks against the US but are also framed as a ‘liberation’ tactic to help justify the joint US-Israel operation against Iran. Trump’s constant churning of social media declarations on Truth Social for liberating the Iranians from the ‘tyranny’ of the Islamic Republic regime on one hand, and profanity-laden social media posts threatening Iran over Hormuz on the other, signify a new strategy of warfare emphasizing public psychology. Trump’s communication efforts are also aimed at building political pressure and strategic signaling during wartime. 

Trump’s PD messaging also conveys Washington’s disdain for ‘dialogue between people who count and who are going to count’ (Parmar 2010). Instead, the US President’s online vitriol indicates the utilization of technology for manipulation and influence-building amongst the domestic public while psychologically intimidating foreign perceptions, thereby communicating Washington’s power to force compliance and its strength to subvert. It is interesting to note how authoritarians attempt to selectively ‘engage’ while leaders in democracies shun engagement, preferring to employ technology to ‘project power’. President Masoud, in the meantime, has been framing Israeli military actions as ‘genocidal criminal aggression’ aiming to strengthen domestic solidarity while influencing international perception for garnering public support against the US-Israel attacks. 

Both Trump and Masoud’s aggressive employment of social media platforms highlight digital messaging’s effective role during wars. In fact, soft propaganda, incorporating entertaining formats and participatory elements, are being extensively deployed by both the US and Iran to foster group identity and solidarity for making certain policies ‘feel’ right even before audiences can evaluate them – a strategy deemed particularly critical during military conflicts and discords. 

‘Slopaganda’: A new reality in democracies

Disinformation is ancient: ‘Empires may have been built on information, but their power was often legitimized and reproduced through misinformation, distortion and outright lies as well’. However, online disinformation or fake news, pushed by governments, including democracies, has been a recent phenomenon. The rise of digital disinformation in democracies has led to a sustained period of ‘democratic recession’ in the world over the last few decades. The US, Israel and Iran war have been witnessing a heightened flow of disinformation. ‘Slopaganda’, an AI-generated slop that serves propagandist purposes, has been flooding the zone to shape the outcomes of the war by manipulating narratives.

With the public in search of information with few credible sources available, slopaganda, given its ability to penetrate people’s mental defences, has been generating half-truths to confuse and mislead the public. During crises like the current one, disinformation becomes even more powerful – attention-grabbing and emotionally arresting – typically in a negative way – delivered to a distracted audience. Governments and individual leaders, during these times, actively turn to social media  to manipulate public perceptions and justify their actions while garnering support for their cause.

Contemporary global leaders like Trump blatantly post narratives aligned with their alleged national interests. Many argue that Trump’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) posts are a part of the same intoxicating mix of real and false information that has always characterized the leadership’s rhetoric. He isn’t interested in telling the truth but interested in telling his truth. While the US President continues to be accused of ‘wild conspiracy theories and ego-boosting posts’, the White House has also been actively churning out slopaganda. The US media briefings have included  misleading videos  of real American attacks against Iran, blending clips from popular movies, television series and video games. 

During conflicts, social media affordances – both manipulated and propagandist together with censorship restrictions – constructs an illusion of dialogue and participatory communication. Iran’s media apparatus, the main source of information for the domestic Iranians, has been setting the agenda for the government by mixing facts with fiction to present an official version of events to its domestic audience for rallying support and intending to shorten the war while making it painful for both the US and Israel. This is in line with McCombs and Shaw’s (1972) agenda-setting theory, which proposes that mass media does not tell people what to think but what to think about. In Iran, with a near-total internet blackout in place to control narratives and Iranians cut off from alternate sources of information generated outside the country, the state media outlets have turned to AI-doctored images to spread alleged battlefield victories and misrepresenting numbers of American casualties. These manufactured updates not only make the Iranian public feel a part of the winning side, but it also instils pride in them for being able to turn the course of the war against the mighty US. 

Concluding Thoughts

In the past few years – the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russia–Ukraine and Gaza conflicts, and now the US, Israel, Iran military conflict – have witnessed an extensive and aggressive utilization of information technologies. Building and shaping digital narratives around the crises facing the disconcerted international order, this new communication system not only reflects their significance and relevance but also highlights their tendencies to annihilate space and time during disputes and political deadlocks while helping leaderships to project power. Trump’s assertive and combative messages qualify more as international propaganda, perpetuating the current less-liberal tendencies of the international system. 

It is fascinating how technology has made digital messaging, propagada and agenda-building more affordable and simpler irrespective of a country’s size, strength or power. Iran, by way of digital affordances, has been able to punch over its international status, reputation and strength. These affordances have also removed the distinction between democratic and authoritarian practices of digital PD. Both leaders exhibit similar tendencies to control and push their own narratives while engaging their audiences. Their direct online messages around the conflict are similar – tactical, manipulative and effective to control – further establishing the role of technology as an amplifier during conflicts and disputes.

References

• Manor, Ilan. (2019). Digitalization of Public Diplomacy. Springer
• Palit, Sinha, Parama. (2023). New Media and Public Diplomacy: Political Communication in India, the United States and China. Routledge
• Parmar, Inderjeet. (2010). ‘Challenging elite anti-Americanism in the Cold War: American Foundations, Kissinger’s Harvard Seminar and the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies’ In Inderjeet Parmar, Michael Cox (eds) Soft Power and US Foreign Policy: Theoretical, Historical and Comparative Perspectives. Routledge
• Rawnsley, D. Gary. (1996). Radio Diplomacy and Propaganda. Macmillan Press