War And Feed: Social Media As A New Battle-Front In The US-Iran-Israel War

By Saadia Azim

On April 8, 2026, much of the eastern world woke to a chilling message on social media. It came from the President of the United States. Posted on Truth Social, the platform he often uses for his most immediate and consequential statements, it declared: “A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Reuters reported that he published it ahead of an 8 p.m. deadline he had set for Iran. Later that day, with less than two hours left before the deadline, he reversed course and announced a two-week ceasefire. But by then the sentence had already travelled. It had done what wartime language is designed to do: not merely describe power, but display it in public.

A parallel message came from the other side. In a post on X published before that threat, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian claimed that more than 14 million Iranians had registered to sacrifice their lives in defence of Iran. The claim itself bore the mark of wartime rhetoric: a message aimed not only at the adversary, but also at supporters, at history, and at the feed.

A social media stream is called a feed for good reason: it feeds minds. Feeds are now among propaganda’s most relentless tools, recruiting supporters, provoking adversaries, and manufacturing rival versions of war in real time. But this informational dimension of the war rarely remains confined to the screen. In India and elsewhere, it quickly spills into heated television debates, public discourse, and political whataboutery, where spectacle, outrage, and repetition turn propaganda into common sense. Fears about oil, geopolitics, and the wider uncertainty of this war soon thus seeped into local politics and everyday anxieties.

This is the defining lesson of modern warfare: missiles may destroy infrastructure, but propaganda reshapes meaning. It works not only by spreading falsehoods, but by manufacturing fear, hardening emotions, shifting attention, reframing conversations, and fixing impressions before facts can settle. Long before historians assemble archives, publics assemble their own version of events. That is why propaganda cannot be dismissed as mere theatre surrounding ‘real’ combat. It is itself a weapon: an organised intervention into how a population feels, what it fears, and what it comes to accept as already true.

The current U.S.-Iran war has made this impossible to miss. Reuters reported that President Trump accused Iran of using AI as a ‘disinformation weapon’ to exaggerate battlefield success and domestic support. WIRED showed how X was flooded with fake and AI-generated war content, while ai tools such as Grok struggled to verify footage and, at times, generated misleading material of their own.

Fact-checkers have exposed the pattern with striking clarity: AI-generated images falsely claiming to show captured troops, rumours of leaders’ deaths amplified by influential voices, online speculation, and a relentless digital war of memes, manipulated visuals, and real-time taunts from top leaders in which fabrication and agenda-setting repeatedly outpace fact. In the age of AI-driven propaganda and the constant feed, reality itself must keep proving that it is real.

That is what makes propaganda militarily useful. It can magnify victories, mask setbacks, manufacture inevitability, and project strength far beyond the battlefield’s measurable facts. It can demoralise an adversary by making resistance look futile, while stiffening its own camp by turning vulnerability into spectacle and injury into sacrifice.

And this is how manufactured perception hardens into history: not archival history yet, but a public version that becomes common sense, dinner-table talk, partisan folklore, and eventually political memory. When President Trump invoked civilisational annihilation, he was doing more than issuing a threat. He was trying to fix the scale, morality, and emotional stakes of the conflict in a single sweeping line. The post was a strategy turned into a spectacle. The statement fed volatility in markets, oil, defence stocks, and public economic sentiment.

If propaganda, in the form of the constant feed, is now part of the war machinery, then information defence must also become part of state preparedness. Not as censorship, but as a public infrastructure of credibility. A democracy that builds early-warning systems for missile strikes but has no institutional response to coordinated disinformation, despite its damage to truth and public trust, is fighting an asymmetric war with one hand tied. This does not mean tuning out the news. It means learning to move from alarm to evidence.

Missiles wound by impact; propaganda wounds by imprint. It casts the enemy as weak or monstrous, recasts one’s own violence as justified or inevitable, and leaves the undecided viewer with a ready-made memory before the record has settled. In older wars, states fought for territory and wrote the narrative later. In this one, they fight for the narrative while the territory is still burning.

The writer is the Chief Operating Officer of a digital public service delivery program of the Government of West Bengal. Her forthcoming book, Forwarded as Received: How Misinformation Turns Viral, Violent, and True, explores informational disorders in the public domain.

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer. The facts and opinions expressed here do not reflect the views of ETV Bharat)