Iran Emerges as a Top Disinformation Threat in U.S. Presidential Race

A website called Savannah Time describes itself as “your trusted source for conservative news and perspectives in the vibrant city of Savannah.” Another site, NioThinker, wants to be “your go-to destination for insightful, progressive news.” The online outlet Westland Sun appears to cater to Muslims in suburban Detroit.

None are what they appear to be. Instead, they are part of what American officials and tech company analysts say is an intensifying campaign by Iran to sway this year’s U.S. presidential election.

Iran has long carried out clandestine information operations against its adversaries, especially Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United States, but until now, most of its activities were conducted under the shadow of similar campaigns by Russia and China. Its latest propaganda and disinformation efforts have grown more brazen, more varied and more ambitious, according to the U.S. government, company officials and Iran experts.

Iran’s efforts appear intended to undermine former President Donald Trump’s campaign to return to the White House, according to the officials and companies, but they have also targeted President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, suggesting a wider goal of sowing internal discord and discrediting the democratic system in the United States more broadly in the eyes of the world.

“Iran is becoming increasingly aggressive in their foreign influence efforts, seeking to stoke discord and undermine confidence in our democratic institutions,” Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, warned recently.

Haines warned Americans to be wary “as they engage online with accounts and actors they do not personally know.”

Her office joined the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency last month to issue a statement noting that “Iran perceives this year’s elections to be particularly consequential in terms of the impact they could have on its national security interests, increasing Iran’s inclination to try to shape the outcome.”

Iran’s mission to the United Nations declined to comment on disinformation campaigns and websites targeting the United States. In an earlier statement issued Aug. 19, addressing efforts to hack Trump’s campaign, the mission said that the allegations “are unsubstantiated and devoid of any standing” and that Iran “harbors neither the intention nor the motive to interfere with the U.S. presidential election.”

Iran’s vast network of influence operatives and hackers includes front companies controlled by the Revolutionary Guard, according to one Iranian official and another Iranian who works in the state’s media and information sector, both of whom are familiar with the country’s disinformation campaigns. Both asked that their names not be published because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The Guard is a powerful and elite force entrenched in every sector of the country, including the economy, politics and cyberspace.

The government and the Guard also operate a network of individuals who use social media platforms to push Iran’s views, some under assumed names. They also commission projects from tech firms and startups in Iran, some of which are not fully aware of the projects’ true purposes, the officials said.

The two Iranians — one is a member of the Guard — said Iran’s government had increased the already significant resources it poured into its information operations since 2022, when women-led protests rocked the nation. Government agents, they said, routinely scout Iranian universities to recruit top tech graduates, offering high salaries, research funding and office space.

“Iran’s strategy in the field of information and propaganda is similar to how the Revolutionary Guards manage the proxy militias across the Middle East,” said Amir Rashidi, director of digital rights and security at Miaan Group, a human rights organization focused on the Middle East. “They infiltrate gradually but forcefully and play the long game.”

Already this year, Iranian operatives have succeeded in hacking the emails of Roger Stone, a longtime adviser to Trump, and attempted to penetrate the campaign of Biden and Harris, with unclear results. Meta disclosed last month that it had detected a similar effort against both political campaigns on WhatsApp, the messaging app.

Iran’s focus on the United States sharpened as Israel, an American ally, invaded the Gaza Strip after the Hamas attack Oct. 7. Since then, Israel has also exchanged fire with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Both movements are part of an Iranian-backed network of militia across the Middle East.

Across the United States this spring, Iran also used social media to stoke student-organized protests against Israel’s war in Gaza, with operatives providing financial assistance and posing as students, according to U.S. intelligence assessments.

Iran has denied involvement in the protests, though the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, cheered them on in an open letter.

Since the Islamic Republic’s inception in 1979, disinformation and propaganda have been a core part of the regime’s identity. As technology evolved, so did Iran’s tactics and ambitions, with Khamenei in 2011 describing cyberspace as the new frontier for Iran’s information “jihad,” or war.

That year, he ordered the creation of the Supreme Council for Cyberspace, a policymaking body. He called on the Iranian government and armed forces to work with the council — which was called out by human rights groups as a state tool for oppression — to advance the country’s interests and Islamic ideology.

“Iran basically transferred its robust existing infrastructure and mindset of disinformation from traditional media tools to cyberspace and in the process globalized its mission,” said Omid Memarian, an Iran expert for Dawn, a Washington-based advocacy group, who has researched disinformation.

Before 2020, however, Iran demonstrated little interest in directly affecting U.S. elections, according to a report published early that year by the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.

That began to change after Trump unilaterally exited the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers and imposed severe economic sanctions. Trump also ordered the 2020 assassination in Baghdad of Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, who led the Revolutionary Guard’s powerful Quds Force.

Influence operations linked to Iran have since accelerated, Microsoft noted in a report last year. The company’s researchers identified seven distinct campaigns in 2021; a year later, there were 24.

Clint Watts, the director of Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center, warned in a report last month that one Iranian operation has since March been preparing activities in the United States “that are even more extreme.” That could include inciting violence against political figures or groups to sow doubt about the election’s outcome.

At least five deceptive websites have emerged to feed American voters a steady diet of content intended to undermine support for Israel and trust in U.S. democracy more broadly, according to Microsoft and OpenAI, which detected the use of its artificial intelligence tools in the efforts.

Iran’s information efforts have mostly targeted Trump. One article on NioThinker, the liberal-leaning site that Microsoft tied to Iran’s efforts, described the former president as an “opioid-pilled elephant in the MAGA china shop” and a “raving mad litigiosaur.”

The Iranian campaigns, though, have also targeted Democrats. A recent headline on Savannah Time, which has no obvious connection to the city in Georgia, warned that Harris represented “a dangerous flirtation with Communist-style price controls.” Its content often echoes conservative news outlets in the United States, railing against policies supporting LGBTQ+ or other gender issues.

The two Iranian officials said Iran was largely unconcerned with the ultimate victor in November and believed that Washington’s animosity transcends either political party. The larger goal, they said, was to sow unrest, deepen polarization and place Iran in the echelon of Russia and China as a geopolitical power.

Iran has also accused the United States and Israel of carrying out disinformation campaigns aimed at destabilizing the country. It has been the target of cyberattacks from both countries, including on a military ship and on its nationwide fuel distribution system.

Iran’s influence efforts recall those by Russia, which hacked the campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2016 and conducted influence operations on social media. In the 2020 presidential election, Iran obtained American voter registration data and used it to send intimidating fake emails to Democratic voters. Some of the messages pretended to be from the Proud Boys, a far-right extremist group, while others contained links to a deceptive video that attempted to fan doubts about mail-in voting.

A declassified intelligence assessment from 2021 found that Iran sought to undercut Trump’s election prospects and discredit the democratic process, with a larger aim to damage the perception of the United States in the Middle East.

During the midterm elections in 2022, Iran once again attempted to interfere, hoping to “exploit perceived social divisions,” according to another declassified intelligence report. Experts found evidence that Iranian officials wanted to strengthen nationalist groups and use social media to pit extremists against one another in 2024.

Iran also considered tactics such as establishing fake news agencies to interact with U.S. media outlets and deploying “troll teams” on social media, according to the intelligence assessment.

Twitter, the platform later renamed X, found three Iran-based influence networks in October 2022, according to the assessment. They were made up largely of accounts pretending to be left-leaning Americans who espoused pro-Palestinian sentiments and attempted to raise funds for American candidates and endorse local politicians, generally progressive ones.

“They can be quite creative,” John Hultquist, the chief analyst at Google’s Mandiant Intelligence, said of Iran’s information operations.

Iran’s covert influence operations are largely conducted by units within the Guard. The U.S. government has identified at least three front companies it says are controlled by the Guard: International Union of Virtual Media, the Iranian Islamic Radio and Television Union, and Bayan Rasaneh Gostar Institute.

A help-wanted ad for Bayan Gostar doesn’t describe what type of work the company performs, but it says employees can work remotely and receive a government salary and benefits. Applicants must be “young and ambitious” and “familiar with cyberspace and social media platforms.”

The Department of Treasury imposed sanctions on all three companies before the 2020 election. It specifically accused Bayan Gostar of “exploiting social issues within the United States, including the COVID-19 pandemic, and denigrating U.S. political figures.”

Now, with the next American election just weeks away, Iran appears undaunted.

“They clearly are not concerned about blowback,” said Bret Schafer, a senior fellow with the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy. “The risk tolerance is quite high, and that makes them a concern, because if they’re not worried about getting caught or naming and shaming, that allows them to just try a bunch of stuff and be pretty aggressive.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .