As attacks spread after the bombing of Iran by U.S. and Israeli forces, a video circulated widely of crowds peering up at fire, smoke and debris coming from the top of a high-rise building said to be in Bahrain.

Social media users claimed an Iranian attack had hit the skyscraper. But while buildings in Bahrain have been struck by Iranian missiles during the Iran war, this video wasn’t real. It was generated with artificial intelligence and shared by accounts associated with the Iranian government as part of an effort to amplify its successes.

There are multiple clues that the video was not authentic, including two cars on the left side of the clip that appear stuck together and a man in the bottom-right corner whose elbow seems to move straight through a backpack.

A deluge of misrepresented or fabricated videos has spread widely online since the Iran war began last weekend, fueled in part by state-linked propaganda and influence campaigns — particularly around who is winning the war and how many casualties there have been.

“The content that’s coming from state actors tends to be a little better targeted,” said Melanie Smith, senior director of policy and research on information operations at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. “They have a very clear kind of narrative structure and the videos are just used to support some kind of statement they want to make about the conflict and about the kind of geopolitical situation writ large.”

Pro-Iran social media accounts have adopted a narrative that exaggerates the destruction and death tolls wrought by the country’s military — a position supported by what is being reported in Iranian state media. This has led to a large number of AI-generated videos of supposed air strikes, such as the one of the Bahraini high-rise on fire.

An ongoing Russia-aligned influence operation called Operation Overload, also referred to as Matryoshka or Storm-1679, has been posting videos designed to impersonate intelligence agencies and news outlets, undermining people’s sense of safety in an effort to sway their behavior — a tactic the network has previously used during election cycles. For example, it shared a warning falsely attributed to Israeli intelligence telling Israelis in Germany and the U.S. to be cautious when in public or to not go outside at all.

Iranian censorship confuses matters further

Misrepresented and fabricated videos have been a key feature of other recent conflicts, such as the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas wars, but experts say a major difference now is the lack of information from the Iranian public due to internet shutdowns and general censorship — a loss of perspectives that could have worked both for and against the Iranian government.