What Iranians are being told about the war

The first reports appeared on foreign screens, beyond the reach of most Iranians. On 28 February Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said there were "signs that the tyrant is no more," suggesting Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been killed in a joint US-Israeli strike. Iranians watching state television, however, encountered silence.

Government officials would neither confirm nor deny Khamenei's death. On one of the state broadcaster's channels, IRTV3, one news presenter urged viewers to "trust" him and the "latest information" the government had. He dismissed news of Khamenei's death as "baseless rumours", which would "soon be revealed."

It took until the following morning before Iranian state media reported the death of Khamenei, hours after US President Trump publicly announced it on social media.

Since the beginning of the war that has reportedly killed more than 1,200 people in Iran and spread to Lebanon and Gulf Arab states, Iranian state media has blended fact with fiction, presenting an official version of events to its domestic audience.

Although millions of Iranians follow foreign-based Persian-language satellite TV channels, accessing independent information can be difficult. Internet blackouts, censorship, and restricted channels leave Iranians largely cut off from the outside world during unrest and conflict.

The BBC followed the first week of coverage of the war by the Iranian state media and found that they have centred their reporting on civilian suffering, calls for retaliation against its "enemies", pushes for public loyalty to the Islamic Republic, whilst giving little attention to military and government facilities struck by Israel and the US.

We also found examples of disinformation.

According to media watchdog Reporters Without Borders, Iran is one of the world's most repressive countries for press freedom.

Since the 1979 revolution when the Islamic Republic of Iran was established, all media has been operating under strict restrictions. Most Western-based and Persian-language news outlets, including BBC Persian, are banned from reporting from the country.

Although the regime's main platforms are TV and radio, it also operates online – through news websites and networks like Instagram, Telegram, and X. Access to these social media platforms from inside Iran typically requires a virtual private network (VPN).

Its media apparatus has become the main source of information for people living in the country, particularly when the internet is cut off.

"They have a narrative that they're pushing," says Mahsa Alimardani, from the human rights organisation Witness. "It is that they are quite victorious and that their military is very strong."

Multiple Iranian state media outlets have reported that Iranian forces killed or injured hundreds of American troops, inflating the number of enemy casualties.

On 3 March, Tasnim news, a semi-official news agency associated with Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), reported that 650 military personnel from the US had been killed in the first two days of the war. It quoted a spokesperson from the IRGC.

The claim was picked up by global news outlets from countries like India, Turkey and Nigeria.

At the time, the Pentagon had confirmed the death of six US soldiers. On 13 March, the US Central Command confirmed the death of an additional seven US service members.

New technology is also helping state media push propaganda.

In a Facebook post, which has since been deleted, the state-run English-language news channel, Press TV, shared a video of a burning building, with plumes of smoke rising into the air.

"Smoke rises from a high-rise in Bahrain following Iran's attack," read the description.

But a close inspection revealed unusual details in the video, such as two cars seemingly blending into one – a sign that the video was fake, and made using AI.

"While the use of AI-generated content in war propaganda certainly isn't new, the use of AI forgeries by major state media outlets, even those that don't exactly have a reputation for adhering to the truth, is striking," says Brett Schafer, senior director of the UK-based think tank Institute of Strategic Dialogue. "Iranian state media's repeated use of deepfakes suggests that this is a feature of their war reporting rather than a bug."

Like much of the AI slop about the war that's flooded social media, it's unclear who made it and where it came from. However, since the war began the BBC has seen other examples of AI imagery shared by government outlets to push their narrative. Much of this imagery is hyper unrealistic and intended to glorify rather than mislead.

The White House and US president Donald Trump also routinely share glorifying AI-generated images or videos meant to glorify. Israeli prime-minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently shared on Instagram an AI-generated image depicting himself, Trump, and wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill in a triumphant pose. The post was added by a news outlet through the social media platform's collaboration feature.

Iran's track record of feeding kernels of truth alongside false information has sown doubt among many critics of the regime inside and outside the country.

When Iranian state media reported on 3 March that more than 160 children and staff were killed in a strike on a school – in what independent experts say was likely a US operation targeting a nearby military base – it also shared an aerial picture of a mass funeral.

Opponents of the government claimed the funeral had been AI-generated. But the image was real. We geolocated it to a cemetery about 3.7km (2.3 miles) from the school, confirming that the trees, road layout and a nearby building matched those visible in satellite imagery.

Freshly dug graves also appear on satellite imagery from the day after the funeral. The day before, the ground was bare.

"We have to hold two truths at the same time," Mahsa Alimardani, from Witness, says. The Iranian regime often hides evidence when it is the perpetrator of abuses, but during the war it will also invest heavily in documenting civilian casualties.

While that documentation can serve propaganda and the state's war narrative, she says, it doesn't automatically make it false.

When it comes to Iran's state reporting, Alimardani notes, one should hold "healthy scepticism."