Network linked to Israel pushes to shape external Iran protest narrative

Network linked to Israel pushes to shape external Iran protest narrative An Al Jazeera investigation uncovers how a coordinated campaign involving Israeli officials and suspicious accounts are hijacking the #FreeThePersianPeople hashtag. Transcendent moments in geopolitics that reverberate around the world are no longer just forged in the streets or inside situation rooms. They are increasingly engineered in the digital sphere, where actors, often with a self-serving agenda, compete to control the narrative, define its meaning and decide who speaks for whom. In recent weeks as protests erupted in Iranian cities, the hashtag #FreeThePersianPeople trended on X. The campaign was accompanied by a flood of posts heralding an imminent “decisive moment” in Iran’s history and presenting themselves as the authentic voice of the Iranian people. Recommended Stories list of 4 items list 1 of 4 Iran since 1979: A timeline of crises list 2 of 4 Who is Reza Pahlavi? The exiled ‘prince’ urging Iranians to ‘seize cities’ list 3 of 4 Iran’s FM says no executions of protesters, as Trump lowers rhetoric list 4 of 4 Russia unlikely to risk ‘reputation failure’ by intervening in Iran unrest However, an extensive data analysis by Al Jazeera reveals a different picture. Tracking the sources of this interaction and its dissemination paths uncovers that the digital campaign did not originate organically from within Iran. Instead, it was spearheaded by external networks - primarily accounts linked to Israel or pro-Israel circles - that played a central role in manufacturing momentum and steering the discourse toward specific geopolitical goals. ‘Abnormal’ patterns of circulation The data associated with the campaign reveals a striking anomaly in how the hashtag spread, indicative of artificial amplification. Al Jazeera’s analysis found that 94 percent of the 4,370 posts analysed were retweets compared with a negligible percentage of original content. More significantly, the number of accounts producing original content did not exceed 170 users, yet the campaign reached more than 18 million users. This massive gap between the limited number of sources and the vast reach is a hallmark of coordinated influence operations, often referred to as “astroturfing”, in which pre-packaged messages are amplified to create the illusion of widespread public consensus. A single narrative, multiple formats A review of the content shows the hashtag was not merely an expression of social or economic grievances. Instead, it carried a rigid political framework designed to reframe and actually pour on the unrest. The discourse portrayed developments inside Iran as a “moment of collapse” and relied on sharp binaries: “The People vs. The Regime”, “Freedom vs. Political Islam” and “Iran vs. The Islamic Republic”. The campaign heavily promoted Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s last shah, as the sole political alternative. Pahlavi himself engaged with the campaign, a move that was immediately amplified by Israeli accounts describing him as the “face of the alternative Iran”. But he is not thought of in those terms by a majority of Iranians, many of whom have memories of his father’s abuses and how the CIA restored...

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