The video spread at a velocity only social media can generate. Missiles rained down on the USS Abraham Lincoln, blasting fighter jets into the sea, the vessel breaking apart in a dramatic fireball — shared millions of times before anyone thought to ask whether the carrier was still sailing.
It was. Analysis using the AI detection tool Hive showed roughly 99.9% of the content contained AI-generated elements. U.S. Central Command was blunt: “The Lincoln was not hit. The missiles launched didn’t even come close.”
The dead ships keep sailing.
One of the big questions in this conflict is who is steering the story? What’s real and what’s artificial? Welcome to the first real war fought simultaneously on the ground and in competing digital realities.
Since U.S. and Israeli forces launched strikes on Iran on February 28, the information battlefield has been as contested as the physical one. The New York Times identified more than 110 distinct AI-generated images and videos in the first two weeks alone. NewsGuard has now tracked 50 false claims in the conflict’s first 25 days, an average of two a day, with the volume and sophistication still climbing.
Still, the AI bombardment continues. Among the most debunked recent fakes: AFP fact-checkers caught images of burning vehicles in Tel Aviv that actually showed the January 2026 protests in Tehran; Snopes debunked a “new” Iranian strike video on Tel Aviv as footage recycled from June 2025; and Chinese state media circulated a fake image claiming Iraqi resistance had downed a U.S. KC-135 refueling aircraft. Iran has also pivoted its AI content toward American audiences directly, with a Clemson University study published this week finding IRGC-linked accounts flooding X, Instagram and Bluesky with AI-generated videos — including deepfakes mocking President Donald Trump styled after the Lego movies — reaching millions of viewers.
The playbook, however, was set from the conflict’s first hours. IRGC spokesman Ali Mohammad Naini claimed 650 American troops were killed or wounded in the conflict’s first two days, while CENTCOM confirmed six had actually been killed.
Iranian state broadcaster IRIB TV1 has a documented pattern of airing fabricated footage, in one instance using muted video of an Israeli attack on Iran while narrating a story about Iran striking Israel. The research firm Cyabra documented a pro-Iran campaign generating over 145 million views in days, deploying tens of thousands of fake accounts spreading AI deepfakes portraying Iran as victorious.
“Content can be created instantly, and the types of fake videos that would have taken highly trained people working with expensive software just a few years ago can now be created by anyone with a cell phone and a free app,” Alex Hamerstone, Advisory Solutions Director at TrustedSec, tells Deadline. A fake video of an Iranian missile destroying a U.S. fighter jet, traced by BBC Verify to a military simulator, racked up 70 million views in a single weekend.
The fabrications are growing harder to detect because they have grown more subtle. Steven Feldstein, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, describes the evolution toward the “shallow fake” — manipulating what is real rather than fabricating outright, making detection far harder.
“The advent of gen AI propaganda and the further erosion of trust in gatekeeping institutions make it even more difficult to combat the spread of industrial-level fabricated information,” he tells Deadline. X’s own AI chatbot, Grok, has compounded the problem, telling users seeking fact-checks that AI visuals were real. When Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu posted videos to rebut viral claims of his death, Grok declared the footage fake — swiftly debunked, yet already spread. AI generates the fakes; then AI “verifies” the fakes. Truth has no entry point.
The U.S. government is hardly an innocent bystander. The White House has posted roughly a dozen “hype videos” to X and TikTok: montages weaving Call of Duty killstreaks, Iron Man, Top Gun, and Braveheart and SpongeBob SquarePants with real strike footage, imposed with nothing to distinguish fiction from combat. One now removed video overlaid Call of Duty’s “+100” score notifications on every Iranian target struck.
Further, actor Ben Stiller demanded the removal of a Tropic Thunder clip: “We have no interest in being a part of your propaganda machine. War is not a movie.” Senator Tammy Duckworth, an Army National Guard veteran wounded in Iraq, responded to the montages: “War is not a f—— video game. Six Americans are dead, and thousands more are at needless risk because of your illegal, unjustified War.”
That aesthetic logic extends to the Oval Office itself. NBC News reported this week that military officials compile a two-minute video update for Trump each day showing the most successful strikes, what one official described as “stuff blowing up,” raising concerns among allies that he may not be receiving the complete picture of the war.
The domestic media environment has not emerged unscathed. Fox News apologized earlier this month after airing old footage showing Trump bareheaded at a dignified transfer, rather than the March 7 ceremony at which he wore a campaign baseball cap before six flag-draped coffins — the first American president to do so. The cumulative effect of leading with military progress, minimizing civilian casualties and giving scant airtime to unflattering polling produces for millions of viewers a curated reality rather than an honest one.
Inside Iran, Cloudflare described internet connectivity as a near-complete shutdown, with traffic down 98%. X announced a 90-day demonetization policy for undisclosed AI war content, but researchers say it has done little.
So, what can actually be done?
“It is always incumbent on journalists to vet information, scrutinize for evidence and facts, and not accept at face value narratives presented by officials with an agenda to advance,” Feldstein underscores.
