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

Дата публикации: 14-06-2026 21:00:00

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.

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