Missiles falling on Tel Aviv, attack locators on a map of the Strait of Hormuz, and waterways on an aircraft carrier. We have seen it all. Even bird's-eye view images - or satellite images - of the bunker of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or even of his corpse under the rubble which are actually the work of... AI.
All lies. Deception is capable of camouflaging itself, going down the drain, or becoming a messiah.
"We are facing a war in which propaganda fights for the narrative to sell itself as the good one in history without admitting grays, where everything is black or white," says Alexandre López-Borrull, professor of Information Sciences at UOC. "Unlike other conflicts, where people have a clear opinion, in this one two questions arise: Is this military campaign just? and Whose side are you on?"
This war already has its symbol of digital trolling: the Minab primary school. The media that echoed these recorded images in which a school had been bombed causing over a hundred victims were accused of manipulation by different users on social media. To this day, none of the contenders has acknowledged the authorship of the massacre, but there is no doubt that it is real. Skeptics used an argument they believed blindly: Grok. It turns out that X's AI assured those who asked that the video was old, specifically from 2021, and furthermore, it had not been taken in Iranian territory, but in Afghanistan.
In reality, Grok had a hallucination, in other words, it lied through its teeth. The verification service of the EFE agency has proven that the images were real and corresponded to the current conflict.
Grok, X's AI, confirms to a user on the network that those images did not correspond to the tragedy of the bombed Iranian school, when they actually did.
For the first time, the great hoax of the war was not carried out by a faction, but by a tool of a major tech company.
But this is not the only accusation against Elon Musk's social network. According to an investigation by Wired magazine, a large number of the hoaxes circulating on X come from premium accounts, those with the blue checkmark. It should be clarified that, unlike before Musk took control of Twitter, the company no longer guarantees authenticity with these profiles, it only offers exclusive features or greater visibility. However, many users are unaware of this and interpret that symbol as a sign of credibility.
How do lies that circulate so quickly spread better? "In many cases, influencers are to blame, eager for viral content to boost their accounts, without even verifying the content they share," says López-Borrull.
Let's open a tweet from a person who identifies as Colombian: "Say what you want, but the US Air Force is monumental. Standing ovation for this Pilot!". This tweeter posted a video on Saturday showing a missile chasing a US F18. It is about to reach it, but the skill of the American pilot and the countermeasures launched by the aircraft ultimately destroy the threat. It's like watching Tom Cruise in Top Gun. Another fake. It is a staged scene taken from War Thunder, a war video game.
Moving on. A frightened girl hides from a bombing in Tel Aviv. It seems that Tehran's fierce counterattack is imminent. The recording first focuses on the sky with its lights and then on a group of cars. This video on an X account has reached 5.1 million views, 4,100 retweets, and 32,000 likes. It was one of the hits of the weekend. It informed, scared, and depending on the side, brought joy or outrage. In other words, from a viewer's perspective: it worked.
As reported by Newtral, the clips in this recording correspond to a real attack by Iran on Israel, but not from the current conflict, but from 2024.
We have reached a point where the armies themselves program and counterprogram on X as if they were television channels competing for viewership. Proof of this is what happened with the US Central Command of the Armed Forces when they refuted the information from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard claiming that their ballistic missiles had hit the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. How did they do it? With a tweet: "LIE. The Lincoln was not hit. The missiles launched didn't even come close."
Despite not having exceeded 72 hours, this war is a glorious exercise in manipulation. Whether crude or sophisticated, there is no doubt that it represents a strategic advantage.
The first blow was struck by Israeli intelligence when they managed to hack, right at the beginning of the campaign, a widely used app in Iran called BadeSaba Calendar, dedicated to organizing Muslim prayers. Thousands of Iranians began receiving messages, as confirmed by Wired Middle East, at 30-minute intervals. The first one arrived at 9:52 in the morning, Tehran time: "Help has arrived". It urged the military to surrender their weapons under a promise of amnesty. The one at 10:02 was much scarier: "The time for revenge has come". And so on. The psychological warfare of propaganda has left behind leaflets.
EL MUNDO contacts a hacker working for a major multinational and asks him to download that app manipulated for propaganda purposes to analyze it. He shows its code. "It's curious, look at the languages: Azerbaijani and Spanish". He confirms that BadeSaba was designed by an Indonesian programmer. "Its last update was in March 2024 and it is tremendously successful."
"If someone compromises the Firebase project [platform for making apps], they can send notifications to the entire base." He explains different technical aspects. When asked about its authorship, he responds. "The attribution is Israeli, not surprising." And he adds: "All prayer apps are tainted."
This is the war of the 21st century, lots of hashtags and lots of lies. Undoubtedly, Goebbels' wet dream.