Inside Iran's online propaganda war

Sunday Morning How Iran could be outmaneuvering the U.S. in the online propaganda world .chip { background-image: url('/fly/bundles/cbsnewscore/images/chip-bgd/chip-bgd-sunday-morning.jpg'); } May 24, 2026 / 12:17 PM EDT / CBS News Add CBS News on Google As the war with Iran approaches the three-month mark, another battle is raging far from the front lines. An online propaganda war is currently being waged between the United States and Iran, and global reaction suggests the Iranians are beating the Americans at their own game. Political satire and propaganda have been used as a weapon of war for decades. In 1940, the German army was invading and seizing one European country after another. It would take more than slapstick Hollywood comedy to turn the tide, but Charlie Chaplin as an Adolf Hitler look-alike gave the world an insight into the power of mockery. "The point with all political satire is to mock those in power. It's to lampoon them because it emasculates them," said Bret Schafer, who studies foreign propaganda as a senior director of policy and research at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. "People who are in power, I think, are OK with being criticized. What they're not OK with is being ridiculed and sort of cut down to size."Through the decades, when it came to marketing a product, campaign or vision, no one in the world excelled at it quite like Hollywood and the American advertising industry. And when it comes to American presidents, none has used and orchestrated modern media more effectively than President Trump. So, it's something of a mystery that Iran could be outmaneuvering the U.S. in the online propaganda war. Schafer said his organization conducted a study examining Iranian accounts on the social media platform X in the 50 days after the war began and found there was a thirtyfold increase in the number of views and likes.  For instance, when Mr. Trump posted an image of himself looking Christ-like and tending to...