Hybrid Warfare, Infodemic, and the Politics of Pandemic Disinformation: Analyzing Coordinated Fake News Campaigns Targeting Iran During the COVID-19 Crisis (2020–2021)

Hussein Pabardja; Hossein  Khoshgoftar

doi:10.17323/cmd.2026.32015

Hussein Pabardja University of Tehran
Hossein Khoshgoftar University of Tehran

DOI: https://doi.org/10.17323/cmd.2026.32015

Keywords: COVID-19, fake news, disinformation, hybrid warfare, Iran, infodemic, cognitive warfare, crisis communication

Abstract

The COVID‑19 pandemic generated an unprecedented global infodemic, yet the strategic weaponization of health misinformation within hybrid warfare remains underexplored, particularly in sanctioned and conflict‑adjacent states. This study examines coordinated disinformation campaigns targeting Iran’s COVID‑19 response between December 2019 and September 2021. Using a sequential mixed‑methods design, over 30 million Persian‑language tweets were analyzed, including more than 21 million containing coronavirus‑related terms. Trend‑extraction across Twitter’s Persian corpus and six major Telegram channels identified 89 significant trend‑days from a 676‑day period, with approximately 200 tweets qualitatively analyzed per trend‑day. Findings identify four interrelated modalities—misinformation, strategic disinformation, weaponized mal‑information, and hybrid cognitive operations—operating to erode institutional trust and intensify pandemic anxiety. Vaccine‑related campaigns alone produced roughly 3.9 million tweets across four major events. Over 50% of all coronavirus‑related Persian tweets occurred between January and June 2020, coinciding with peak epidemiological and political uncertainty. By situating Iran as a compound‑crisis case study, the research advances information‑disorder theory and offers implications for platform governance, public health communication, and comparative analyses of hybrid disinformation in crisis environments.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Bastick, Z. (2021). Would you notice if fake news changed your behavior? An experiment on the unconscious effects of disinformation. Computers in Human Behavior, 116, 106633. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2020.106633

Bradshaw, S., & Howard, P. N. (2018). Challenging truth and trust: A global inventory of organized social media manipulation. Oxford Internet Institute, Computational Propaganda Project. Working Paper No. 2018.1.

Brubaker, R. (2004). Ethnicity without groups. Harvard University Press.

Cinelli, M., Quattrociocchi, W., Galeazzi, A., Valensise, C. M., Brugnoli, E., Schmidt, A. L., Zola, P., Zollo, F., & Scala, A. (2020). The COVID-19 social media infodemic. Scientific Reports, 10, 16598. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-73510-5

Clark-Ginsberg, A., & Petrun Sayers, E. (2020). Communication missteps during COVID-19 hurt those already most at risk. Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, 28(4), 482–484. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5973.12304

Coombs, W. T. (2007). Protecting organization reputations during a crisis: The development and application of Situational Crisis Communication Theory. Corporate Reputation Review, 10(3), 163–176. https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.crr.1550049

Douek, E. (2021). The rise of content cartels. Knight First Amendment Institute, Columbia University. https://knightcolumbia.org/content/the-rise-of-content-cartels

Fallis, D. (2014). A functional analysis of disinformation. iConference 2014 Proceedings, 621–627. https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/items/47269

Ferrara, E., Varol, O., Davis, C., Menczer, F., & Flammini, A. (2016). The rise of social bots. Communications of the ACM, 59(7), 96–104. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1407.5225

Galeotti, M. (2016). Hybrid, ambiguous, and non-linear? How new is Russia’s new way of war? Small Wars & Insurgencies, 27(2), 282–301. https://doi.org/10.1080/09592318.2015.1129170

Glaser, B. G., & Strauss, A. L. (1967). The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative research. Aldine.

Guest, G., Bunce, A., & Johnson, L. (2006). How many interviews are enough? An experiment with data saturation and variability. Field Methods, 18(1), 59–82. https://doi.org/10.1177/1525822X05279903

Halfmann, A., Dech, H., Wessler, H., Schlenker, L., & Riemann, J. (2018). Moving closer to the action: How viewers’ experiences of eyewitness videos in TV news influence the trustworthiness of the reports. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 95(4), 1036–1057. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077699018785890

Hoffman, F. G. (2007). Conflict in the 21st century: The rise of hybrid wars. Potomac Institute for Policy Studies.

Islam, M. S., Sarkar, T., Khan, S. H., Kamal, A. H. M., Hasan, S. M. M., Kabir, A., … & Seale, H. (2020). COVID-19-related infodemic and its impact on public health: A global social media analysis. The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 103(4), 1621–1629. https://doi.org/10.4269/ajtmh.20-0812

Johns Hopkins University. (2020). COVID-19 Dashboard by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE). Johns Hopkins University. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

Jozwiak, R. (2020). EU Monitor sees drop in COVID-19 disinformation. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. https://www.rferl.org/a/covid-19-disinformation-eu-decrease/30625483.html

Kalsnes, B. (2018, September 26). Fake news. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. Oxford University Press. https://oxfordre.com/communication/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.001.0001/acrefore-9780190228613-e-809

Landis, J. R., & Koch, G. G. (1977). The measurement of observer agreement for categorical data. Biometrics, 33(1), 159–174.

Murray, W., & Mansoor, P. R. (Eds.). (2012). Hybrid warfare: Fighting complex opponents from the ancient world to the present. Cambridge University Press.

Nimmo, B., Eib, C., Tamora, L., & Naugle, C. (2020). Exposing secondary infektion. Graphika. https://graphika.com/reports/exposing-secondary-infektion

Ochu, C. L., Benedict, S., Ochu, P. A., Binnwat, C., & Mbah, C. (2021). COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy: Addressing the challenge. Vaccines, 9(12), 1493. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2022.104241

Pennycook, G., & Rand, D. G. (2019). Fighting misinformation on social media using crowdsourced judgments of news source quality. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(7), 2521–2526. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1806781116

Pomerantsev, P. (2019). This is not propaganda: Adventures in the war against reality. PublicAffairs.

Rácz, A. (2015). Russia’s hybrid war in Ukraine: Breaking the enemy’s ability to resist. Finnish Institute of International Affairs Report 43.

Roozenbeek, J., Schneider, C. R., Dryhurst, S., Kerr, J., Freeman, A. L. J., Recchia, G., van der Bles, A. M., & van der Linden, S. (2020). Susceptibility to misinformation about COVID-19 across 26 countries. Royal Society Open Science, 7(10), 201199. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.201199

Statista. (2021). Number of Telegram users in Iran from 2017 to 2023. Statista Research Department. https://www.statista.com

Tandoc, E. C., Lim, Z. W., & Ling, R. (2017). Defining “fake news”: A typology of scholarly definitions. Digital Journalism, 6(2), 137–153. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2017.1360143

Twitter Safety. (2019, October 31). Disclosing networks of state-linked information operations. Twitter Blog. https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/information-operations-october-2019

United States Institute of Peace. (2020). The impact of sanctions on Iran. USIP Senior Study Group on Iran. https://www.usip.org

Vosoughi, S., Roy, D., & Aral, S. (2018). The spread of true and false news online. Science, 359(6380), 1146–1151. https://doi.org/10.1126/SCIENCE.AAP9559

Wardle, C., & Derakhshan, H. (2017). Information disorder: Toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policymaking. Council of Europe Report DGI(2017)09.

World Health Organization. (2020). Novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV): Situation report 13. World Health Organization. https://www.who.int