Iran’s Narrative Warfare Shows How Propaganda Scales Power

Propaganda operations and, in particular, well-run propaganda operations are fascinating because they attempt brain hacking at scale, a much harder problem than everyone thinks it is. Operators, who do the propaganda, often overstate the reach and impact because their budget and livelihood depend upon the success. Hence, the claimed success of all propaganda operations must always be viewed with scepticism. 

The Iranian propaganda operation, particularly the LEGO block-style animation movies released by Explosive Media, however, has one contrarian signal to this dynamic – Their ban from YouTube. This contrarian signal is worth exploring because modern social media, if anything, is an engagement measurement engine par excellence, as its entire money-making (and hence livelihood) is dependent on it. 

YouTube allows creators to not just measure views but also tailor the content to reach audiences through a series of strategies (e.g. catch-worthy phrases, embedding, ads, metadata, and interactions). All these are then fed back as signals into the algorithm, which is optimised for engagement (and hence sells more ads, therefore). A key element often overlooked by commentators not well-versed in propaganda operations is that interactions (e.g., sharing, commenting, liking, disliking) are rituals performed by the audience.

Rituals are a great metaphor to think about when it comes to propaganda because they are the strongest form of social marker for preference to a point of view. Consider any social ritual. Often, those who follow the ritual will say that it produces great benefits irrespective of evidence. When a threshold of people perform an act, the social brain screams at us, saying, ‘Surely there is great value there, and all these people doing the ritual is proof of it. Normally, one would be able to offer resistance if the ritual itself is outside their tolerance limit, but the more people follow it, the resistance withers and sooner or later, they participate in the ritual.

While they may not be really buying into the “great benefits” of the ritual initially but merely engaging in it, makes them commit to the meta-narrative (e.g. A great celestial event blessed by the gods happened here) that underpins the ritual and hence makes it easier to shift to a different ritual that they might find acceptable (e.g. a minute of silence instead of a loud procession to celebrate the event).

Thus, measurement of rituals offers a very direct metric of support from a point of view. It also often indicates a change in preference, which could lead to a preference cascade if enough people become aware of the preference. Since social media offers enough metrics that can measure the rituals of sharing, commenting, liking and disliking, removal of the channel of distribution implies that the metrics indicate a preference cascade.

Note that if this were the reverse, there would be no reason to remove the channel, as the failure would be worth showcasing and celebrating for the US (Look, how dim and dull their message is and why the views are sub-1000).

Hence, banning the channel is a clear acceptance that the Iranian propaganda war not only worked but tapped into a clear pre-existing sentiment – The war is very unpopular in the US, and the virality amplified by the ritual of sharing, commenting and talking about it, spooked the US enough to order YouTube to remove the channel.

Historically, wars have always required a level of domestic support because they always cause death, destruction and hardship. Trump’s entire campaign promise was that he would not engage in yet another Middle East war that drains the country and the voters financially. He was richly rewarded with a presidency by voters who were hit by the post-COVID affordability crisis because of the rise in the cost of living.

The success of the Venezuela operation and the previous 12-day Iran war, where no US personnel or assets were lost, had made him believe that Iran is a weak state. This perception was further aided by aggressive selling of the war by Israel and its entrenched lobbying network, a fact that is now beyond dispute, and is even acknowledged by Joe Kent, their erstwhile Director of Counterterrorism. Hence, the US President thought that it would be more of a police operation than a war.

The success of the initial decapitation strikes and the well-known playbook of triggering an internal revolution by arming dissident factions meant that maintaining internal cohesion was the goal of Iranian propaganda operations by invoking Persian pride and the Karbala mythology (Accepting death but not submitting to injustice). The audience for the initial videos, hence, was internal and the supporters elsewhere.

The war termination strategy of Iran, however, was not just survival but to impose an economic cost on not just the US but the whole world, to compel the aggressors to the negotiating table. When Iran was able to hit the THAAD radars and wreck the US bases, thereby reducing the sortie rate and making it impossible for the US and Israel to win the interdiction war (i.e. disarming Iran’s missile program) and as a consequence was able to successfully wield the Hormuz weapon, the theme shifted along with the target audience.

It was no longer about maintaining internal cohesion but projecting victory and pointing to the inevitable strategic defeat of the US and Israel to the audience outside of Iran, and making them root for them (Objective). From then on, they followed the ON3C playbook (Objective-Narrative-Campaign-Context-Content) and were further boosted by various Iranian embassies all over the world.

The narratives chosen were Corruption, Incompetence, Malignancy, Evil and Barbarism for the aggressors and Civilised, Rooted, Wronged and Victory for the defenders. These narratives were then continuously disseminated not just through Videos, but also through public communications by their leaders (e.g. Ghalibaf, Araghchi) and Embassies. The target audience profile meant choosing a specific form of content (e.g., diss track, Hip-hop, rap, humour, puns, protest anthem, wordplay via acronyms). The common visual language used (LEGO) meant the campaigns were instantly recognisable as a genre/theme and hence had cross-appeal and worked well across visual and audio-only media, which have good distribution.

The success of this narrative warfare was also aided by the lack of an effective counter-propaganda operation by the aggressors. The second Trump presidency, in its early days, also shut down the Global Engagement Centre, whose mandate was to address foreign propaganda targeted at US Citizens and institutions. The assumption of Operation Epic Fury, just being a short police operation coupled with intelligence failure of the assessment on Iranian strength and resolve, meant that there was no preparation for a failure scenario.

This was the gap that the Iranians were able to exploit fully, once they were able to wield the Hormuz weapon. Given the current trajectory of the war, it’s economic costs on the world, the cratering of public support for Trump and Israel in the US and the upcoming mid-term elections, where the republicans will most certainly lose both the house and the senate, a negotiated settlement on Iranian terms is with full sanctions relief and integration with rest of the world as the most likely scenario.

And when that happens, Iran would emerge not only as a pole power in a multi-polar world, having defeated both the US and Israel on the battlefield, but also with its prestige at the highest point since ancient times.

That would be the true measure of the success of its narrative warfare.