Propaganda war against Iran: Objectives, techniques and tactics

*By Mohammad Ghaderi

TEHRAN – Rancorous satellite networks as well as a number of official and private accounts in social networks, especially in Twitter, have embarked on waging a full-scale war of attrition against the Islamic Revolution’s media outlets.

These propagandistic moves are being run by directors of notorious social networks against pro-Iran accounts and hashtags over the last couple of days, when protests erupted over a substantial rise in price of subsidized gasoline in Iran.

This is being done while Iranian media outlets are under a series of unfair restrictions.   

The main war against the Islamic establishment of Iran is propaganda war. It is an unfair war whose key tool is to spread lies to the extent possible. They intentionally mix true and untrue reports. 

Objectives:

*To induct hopelessness to the people about their fate and future;
*To induct the Islamic establishment’s inability in managing the country’s economy and security;
*To create a gap between people and the establishment,
*To induct the establishment’s oppressive behavior towards the people;
*To deepen the idea of social inequality;
*To provide some documentaries whose main core is human rights issue to present to the international organizations to pave the ground for imposing more sanctions against Iran;
*To weaken the Islamic establishment’s creditability inside and outside the country and presenting a dictatorial appearance from the most democratic establishment at least in western Asia;
*To complete maximum pressure strategy puzzle to force the country surrender to the enemies’ excessive demands; 
*To manage and then push the situation towards a regime change project. 

Techniques and tactics:

*To voice support for the people’s protests as a sympathetic supporter;
*To provoke the people to pour into the streets in an uncommon way;
*To spread anarchist slogans against the Islamic establishment’s pillar; 
*To use psychological war techniques by reliance on undocumented reports from inside the country;
*To use cross-sectional and biased images and videos;
*To provide fake death toll of protestors via providing fake statistics;
*To attribute damaging properties to the protesting people to highlight gap created between the people and the ruling system;
*To attribute killing of the protesting people to the security forces; 
*To ignore participation of anti-Revolution armed agents and massacre of the people by them;
*To create hashtags and utilize provocative keywords including massacre of people, internet cutoff, plainclothes forces, …. 

The whole above-mentioned processes are occurring despite claims by hostile media outlets and their reporters over their efforts to provide supports for the Iranian people, but not only none of the mentioned media outlets have thus far opposed or criticized the global arrogance’s  oppressive sanctions and economic terrorism against the Iranian people but instead they have voiced their full support for the illegal sanctions and even have prepared the bedrock for tightening sanctions’ noose on the country.