Social media accounts sharing photos of picturesque Scottish landscapes, supporting independence from the United Kingdom, as well as criticising the British government, have, in fact, been deceiving the public.
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Researchers from Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub in South Carolina found that a network of accounts sharing this kind of content was, in reality, affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — an elite paramilitary unit long accused of running foreign influence operations.
The accounts spent months across X, Instagram and Bluesky cultivating followers and building up online credibility, before they started to spread pro-Iranian propaganda following the onset of the US and Israel’s war on Iran in late February.
“After the war started, they completely pivoted to posting pro-Iran footage of Iranian strikes on enemies of Iran, such as Israel and other places such as Saudi Arabia,” Ella Murray, digital influence analyst at Clemson University Media Forensics Hub, told Euronews’ fact-checking team, The Cube.
“So it was also easy to identify that they had access to this footage and were posting the same footage and hashtags across accounts,” she said.
The content shared by these accounts included posts glorifying the deceased Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as well as AI-generated images claiming to show the destruction of US military bases.
Posts criticising US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were also common, as well as posts highlighting the deaths of children and civilians in Iran.
Although many of the profiles presented themselves as women, in reality, they used stolen or AI-generated images.
In one case, researchers discovered that an account pretending to be British copied a post from another account, then accidentally inserted a Farsi character at the start of a hashtag, suggesting that the account’s creator was switching between Persian and English keyboards.
This is just one clue that the accounts were not who they appeared to be.
Two subsets of accounts posting in English were uncovered: one group claiming to be from Scotland and England, and another from Ireland and Northern Ireland.
Before the conflict escalated, these accounts had spent years building up followers and posting “anti-Labour, anti-Union, anti-Starmer [the UK’s prime minister] and anti-Royal Family content,” researchers said, with the Scottish accounts leaning into pro-Scottish independence movements.
“There were real Scottish and Irish people interacting with these accounts,” Murray said, adding that the profiles had blended into real local political conversations before they pivoted to pro-Iranian messaging.
British and Irish accounts were only one part of the network.
Profiles posting in Spanish claiming to be from Texas, California, Venezuela and Chile also carried out a similar operation, presenting themselves as progressive activists, immigrants or supporters of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro.
These posted photos and captions are critical of the controversial US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, jumping on viral events such as protests in Minneapolis following the shooting of Renée Good by an ICE officer.
“The police brutality in Minneapolis is just the tip of the iceberg of institutional racism that affects us all,” one account posted.
A wider crackdown on the IRGC’s operations
In parallel, Europol — the EU’s law enforcement agency — announced in May shut down thousands of IRGC-affiliated accounts across 19 countries between February and April.
The IRGC was formally designated as a terrorist organisation on 19 February, providing law enforcement authorities with a legal basis to target its online infrastructure.
Europol’s digital crackdown also targeted the IRGC’s main X account, which had accumulated more than 150,000 followers.
According to Europol, the posts blended religious martyrdom with pro-Iranian political messages, used AI-generated videos to glorify the IRGC and called on online users to avenge the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
This comes amid wider scrutiny of Iran’s online influence campaigns, which range from outdated war footage to AI-generated content to viral Lego video clips reportedly created by Iranian teams.
Whilst Iranian influence efforts often focus on targeting communities abroad, by integrating into debates, for example, internet access for ordinary Iranians remains restricted and patchy in many areas.
