As fears of regional escalation grew after US strikes on Iran, US President Donald Trump claimed the US-Israel war with Iran was "effectively over" on November 9 at a White House briefing. "We're just keeping it the status quo."
Periods of heightened public interest, such as the conflict involving Iran, create fertile ground for so-called content farms. Following Trump's statement, posts on the Iran war surged online again. And a growing network of accounts claiming links to Iran's military has accumulated millions of views.
DW Fact Check examined a number of these accounts and found recurring signs of content farm behavior. Experts who reviewed the accounts DW provided describe them as part of a broader ecosystem of pro-Iran content aggregators that connect across multiple social media platforms.
Content farms are websites or social media accounts, or a network of either, producing large amounts of cheap content in a short time span. They may be driven by economic incentives, but they can also serve as vehicles for political influence campaigns.
The internet watchdog NewsGuard has found 165 false claims about the Iran warthat collectively have been watched hundreds of millions of times. Only a few of them originated from Iranian state media.
NewsGuard identified the majority as pushing a pro-Iran agenda, shifting toward AI-generated images, and increasingly claiming that accurate stories…