Iranian Media and Officials Outpace American Counterparts In Controlling Soleimani Narrative
Despite a much smaller digital presence, the Islamic Republic continues to outperform American rivals
Last Friday, we reported on the digital media response of state and nonstate actors to the killing of Qasem Soleimani and Mahdi Abu Muhandis, showing an information environment dominated by the Islamic Republic of Iran and allies. Iran is normally a midsize player in the information environment: in the month leading up to Soleimani’s death, Iran published 20k posts, 12th overall, but only a fraction of the count from the United States of America (127k) or the Russian Federation (450k).
But media owned by Tehran dominated in the wake of last Thursday’s events, almost matching Russia in post count (561 to 577) and far outpacing the United States (328), even in English (170 to 62).
The patterns largely held over the weekend, though Russia’s formidable media engine pulled the Kremlin ahead of the pack, publishing 3560 posts on the subject, over 1000 more than any other actor, and driving 7.1M engagements. Russia led in post count in English (1666), Spanish (688), and French (302). Almost 10% of all Russian posts since Sunday highlighted Vladimir Putin’s emergency meetings with Emanuel Macron and with Angela Merkel. The substory supports Russia’s most prolific IO campaign, arguing Russia is the preeminent counterweight to a tactless West. Russia has published almost 12k posts to this campaign in the past sixty days.
Iran published 2,429 posts on the Soleimani’s death and the aftermath, second most overall. Soleimani’s role in expelling ISIL from Iraq figures prominently in the narrative and lends support to the popular Iranian conspiracy that the United States supports ISIL. FarsNews made multiple references to “US-backed ISIS forces” while the Supreme National Security Council claimed the attack was “a crime of revenge by ISIS and the Takfiri [jihadi] terrorists”. The Iranian embassy in China tweeted “ISIS hunter [Soleimani] killed by main ISIS supported [the US]”.
The United States, which on Friday had fewer English posts than Iran, regained some prominence with 1754 posts, the third most overall, and the second most in English (585) and Persian (460). The wide majority of these posts (1268), however, came from editorially independent Voice of America and RFE/RL. The remaining came from the accounts of the State Department, the Secretary of State, and retweets or reshares of those posts from US Embassy accounts. Accounts belonging the military and Department of Defense largely avoided the subject.
In the wake of Soleimani’s death, the United States has had little answer to Iran’s prolific efforts to control the narrative in the global information environment. Combined with the persistent advantage of Iranian ally Russia, digital consumers across languages and platforms have heard a narrative shaped in large part by US adversaries.
