The conflict between the United States and Iran is no longer confined to the skies or the Strait of Hormuz.
While missiles and drone strikes dominate the headlines, a quieter battle is playing out on social media, through memes and misinformation. A stream of competing claims and counter-claims is now shaping the war itself, and the stalled ceasefire talks, in real time.
A recent episode shows exactly how. A sensational, unverified claim about Iran's nuclear programme began life in an obscure pocket of the internet. Within hours it had reached front pages in Israel and the US, been referenced in a speech by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and been shared by Mike Waltz, the Trump administration's ambassador to the United Nations, The New York Times reported.
On the morning of 5 August, an anonymous account on X based in India shared what looked like a bombshell. It claimed that Brig. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, commander of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, had declared his country would never abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons so long as Israel and the United States held theirs. The post came with a photo of the general and an AI-generated image of a mushroom cloud.
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There was no evidence the commander ever said this, and no proof that Iran has built a nuclear weapon. That did not stop the claim from spreading rapidly.
The quotation was picked up by Israeli accounts and...
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