Fake Crown Army Exposed In Persian Bot War

(MENAFN- Kashmir Observer) Bangalore ~ A French investigation has peeled back the curtain on a Persian-language social media boom that looks less like a grassroots uprising and more like a factory line, with billions of interactions traced to networks of suspected fake accounts.

If raw online volume were proof of popularity, Iran's political debate would be the loudest conversation on Earth. Researchers say the surprise is how much of that noise appears to come from coordinated digital operations rather than ordinary users.

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The information war surrounding Iran appears to be thriving long after last year's 12-day war between Iran and the US-Israel alliance, just not necessarily with human participants. Analysts monitoring Persian-language platforms say campaigns run from outside Iran are flooding feeds with automated posts, likes and hashtags on an industrial scale.

French newspaper Le Figaro reported on January 31 that the online“war” surrounding Iran has never paused. In a report titled“Fake accounts, 'likes' and the Shah of Iran: Israel's shadow digital war against the Islamic Republic”, the paper said that while military confrontation with Iran may have slowed, the battle on social media has never stopped.

“Israel is closely monitoring developments in Iran as the Islamic government appears weakened, under internal pressure and facing the threat of a possible American intervention. In June, the Jewish state did not hesitate to strike Iranian targets before entering a phase of strategic reflection. On the military front, the tempo has slowed. But on social media, the war has never stopped.”

According to figures cited in the report, 4,765 accounts on platform X collectively produced 843 million posts promoting exiled royal figure Reza Pahlavi. Another 11,421 accounts generated 1.7 billion likes tied to the same messaging, repeatedly pushing the hashtag“KingRezaPahlavi” into trending territory.

For a language spoken by a relatively small share of the world's population, the engagement figures raised immediate red flags among investigators.

Experts told the newspaper the method relies on brute-force repetition: identical messages deployed in synchronised bursts until algorithms interpret the activity as public enthusiasm. Researchers described it as visibility engineered through volume.

“This accumulation of signals alone is enough to place certain content at the top of feeds, regardless of genuine user engagement,” analysts said - meaning popularity can be simulated long before it is earned.

Jeff Goldberg, founder of digital research group Social Forensics, said the scale points to organised coordination rather than spontaneous activism.“The scale and complexity of manipulations observed in the Persian-speaking space indicate the involvement of a state actor,” he said.

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Social Forensics found many of the accounts posting more than 100 messages per day - a pace more consistent with automation than human advocacy. Another 8,830 accounts repeatedly changed usernames, a pattern commonly associated with influence operations. At least 3,361 linked accounts have since been suspended by the platform.

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