The Propaganda War Goes Global: Iran's IRGC And The Weaponisation Of The Digital Diaspora

By Mohit Desai

By the time the blocky plastic figure of Donald Trump, orange-haired, stumbling through an animated Middle Eastern warzone while Iranian Lego soldiers marched triumphantly overhead appeared on screens across the world and shared on smart phones in remote villages of Lucknow in India, it became clear that something had fundamentally changed in the nature of modern warfare. This was not a fringe internet prank or trolling. This was a state policy, broadcast with the full weight of Iran's propaganda machine.

The war between the United States and Iran, which erupted with joint American-Israeli airstrikes on February 28, 2026, has opened a front that no one could easily anticipate: the battle for the meme and propaganda. As reported by the National Public Radio, Iranian state media has been releasing AI-generated propaganda videos and memes trolling and mocking American President Doanld Trump, through accounts linked to Tasnim News Agency, which is affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

These videos are shared by sympathisers of Iran in India, especially areas with significant Shia population. The trolling and Iranian propaganda goes beyond animation. Iran's vast state media apparatus has adopted a mocking tone in official communications, often delivered in English. In one example, an IRGC spokesman delivers a dry recitation of Donald Trump's own trademark phrase: “Hey, Trump, you are fired”. In a separate and more disturbing video, Iranian state media released an AI-generated clip depicting a dishevelled, sweaty Trump being interrogated by an IRGC officer, connected to a lie detector. The IRGC commander instructs Trump to deny connections to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. When Trump complies, the lie detector lights up and the IRGC officer breaks into laughter.

These viral videos reveal the surface layer of a vast, institutionalised influence apparatus that has been decades in construction. According to the Middle East Forum, Iran’s state-controlled broadcaster, the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), controls approximately 376 million US dollars allocated toward psychological warfare operations. Working alongside IRGC-affiliated news outlets, including Fars News, Tasnim News, Masregh News, and Javan Newspaper, the apparatus employs systematic operational techniques targeting regime enemies. As reported by Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCFA), the man who built much of this infrastructure, Mohammad Ali Naeini, served as the IRGC's official spokesman and head of public relations from mid-2024. His role extended far beyond conventional media duties, encompassing cognitive warfare, message management, and reinforcing narratives both internally and externally. He emphasised the critical importance of imagery and narrative dominance, framing Iran’s conflict as a multidimensional struggle including military, psychological, and technological. On March 20, 2026, Israel eliminated Naeini in a targeted strike, dealing what analysts described as a significant blow to the IRGC’s propaganda machinery. But the machine he built continues to operate.

The Global Shia Network

Perhaps the least visible and most consequential dimension of Iran's information war is its exploitation of Shia diaspora communities spread across Asia, Europe, and beyond.

Iran’s messaging is amplified through clerics delivering political sermons, semi-official Telegram channels, and English-language material specifically aimed at diaspora communities. According to reports, the system's effectiveness lies in its synchronisation: when a new term or narrative frame is introduced, it appears across all these channels simultaneously, a pattern too coordinated to be organic.

A 2024 UK parliamentary submission by the organisation United Against Nuclear Iran revealed the existence of the Baqiatallah Cultural and Social Headquarters, established in 2019 on the orders of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei specifically to bolster the regime’s soft-war capabilities. It directs and shapes IRGC-affiliated news agencies at the forefront of disinformation campaigns. The reach extends well beyond Europe. India, home to one of the world’s largest Shia Muslim populations concentrated in states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Jammu & Kashmir, represents a significant and underexamined node in this network. Iranian cultural missions and Shia religious institutions have long maintained formal and informal links with Indian clerical networks. In the current conflict, intelligence analysts monitoring social media patterns have noted coordinated spikes in pro-Iran content originating from hundreds of accounts based in India. Content on these accounts often mirror narratives first introduced on IRGC-affiliated Telegram channels.

UK parliamentary researchers have warned that the overwhelming majority of Iran-linked entities operating influence campaigns in the West do so in the shadows, largely off the radar of Western authorities, and have called for dedicated psychological taskforces to counter Iranian state disinformation and operations.

For now, the IRGC’s digital foot soldiers keep marching. And somewhere in a server farm in Tehran, or Lucknow, or Lagos an AI tool is already rendering the next frame or writing the next propaganda post.