In mid-February I found myself stuck for two days at Berlin’s Brandenburg Airport, stranded by a winter freeze. It had been a month since Iran’s security forces massacred thousands of protesters on January 8 and 9—dates that will be central to the story of the Islamic Republic’s decline in whatever history is eventually written. In the limbo of an airport hotel, I binged on reports about the killings. I was trying to make sense of the disparate death tolls cited by different organizations—from the 3,117 officially acknowledged by the Iranian state to the 7,007 reported by the US government-funded Human Rights Activists News Agency to the 30,000 published by Time magazine and even higher numbers in some diaspora media.

In an attempt to understand the narratives I could feel taking shape, I did something I had not done in some time: I spent hours streaming Iran International. Known among Iranians simply as “International,” the London-based satellite channel is the most-watched in the country; in a 2023 survey of nearly 40,000 Iranians by the Netherlands-based nonprofit GAMAAN, more than half said they sometimes or often watched it. Across those two days in Berlin, I sat transfixed as presenters and pundits issued full-throated calls for regime change engineered from outside Iran and the installment of the former crown prince, Reza Pahlavi, at the country’s head. The channel aired voice notes from viewers pledging allegiance to Pahlavi, and returned repeatedly to coverage of monarchist rallies in Vienna, Los Angeles, and Paris, where marchers waved the lion-and-sun flag of Iran’s monarchy and the blue and white Israeli colors, shouting, “This is the last battle, Pahlavi will return.” These clips were interspersed with statements by Pahlavi encouraging protestors not to give up, saying the hour of their freedom was “at hand.” International also played heart-wrenching messages from people in Iran narrating the stories of those killed in the January protests—but these accounts seemed intended to support the channel’s calls for foreign intervention and were quickly followed by exhortations to topple the  “bloodsucking” Islamic Republic.

No media outlet has done more to mainstream the call for regime overthrow than Iran International. Founded in 2017, it is widely understood to have been launched with funds from a Saudi investor who has links to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. (Iran International denies that it has received funding from the Saudi government or has any ties to MBS.) From the start, it promoted the destabilization of the Iranian state. In its earliest years it even platformed the Islamist-Marxist group Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), a well-organized Iranian opposition outfit, now based in Albania, that is widely despised for its cult-like structure and its collaboration with Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War. Despite such controversial choices, the new channel soon attracted attention and became known for offering a counternarrative to Iranian state media. It highlighted social and political unrest, featuring dissidents and streaming smartphone footage of protests beside testimony from ordinary Iranians about the regime’s brutality.

The channel also took a favorable line on US President Donald Trump, often reporting on his travels and speeches. When, in 2018, he withdrew from the Obama administration’s deal with the regime to ease economic sanctions in exchange for caps on uranium enrichment, and began tweeting all-caps threats about economically and militarily isolating the country, International mirrored his positions. It amped up its condemnation of Iran’s support for Hamas and Hezbollah—a shorthand for Iran’s role as a regional villain—and began airing statements from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about how the nuclear deal, which liberal commentators had heralded as a diplomatic solution to escalating tensions, was wrongheaded from the start.

People in Iran can access foreign channels like International despite the government’s tight control over the airwaves; even when the state disrupts satellite reception—what Iranians refer to as spreading parazit (static)—people often find other frequencies on which to receive signals. Over the past decades, as censorship has made it practically impossible for homegrown independent media to survive in the country, such Persian-language satellite channels—which also include Voice of America Persian News Network, BBC Persian, and, until its recent closure, Manoto TV—have come to anchor their own insular information environment. The dangers of this situation have become clear in recent months: at the height of the January protests, for example, the Sweden-based researcher Mazdak Azar examined 4,500 videos of the demonstrations and found that pro-Pahlavi chants occurred in only 17 percent of them, yet 81 percent of the protest footage aired on Iran International contained indicators of pro-Pahlavi sentiment, like monarchist flags and chants of “Javid Shah” (“Long live the Shah”). The channel, in other words, gave its audience the impression that nearly all Iranians were calling for the restoration of monarchy.

This kind of coverage feeds into a much wider network of online disinformation, which has helped polarize Iranians worldwide to a disorienting extreme. Although there are no accurate figures to measure pro-war sentiment among Iranians in Iran or abroad, a sizable—and very vocal—number in the diaspora publicly called for the war on their homeland that began on February 28. Pahlavi, of course, was one of them, appearing two weeks earlier at the Munich Security Conference to plead for a US attack. In the months that followed, his supporters held regular rallies in major cities across the US, Canada, Australia, and Europe, where they danced in the streets and shouted “Thank you Trump” and “Thank you Bibi.”

For virtually all Iranians, myself included, the split has also shown up much closer to home. Since the January protests, some of my own friends and family have taken the impossible position of calling for bombs to fall on their country and accused those who disagree of siding with the Islamic Republic. For many, it seems that no third path—of adamantly opposing both foreign intervention and the regime—can be imagined. A friend of mine in Tehran, a former schoolteacher, refused to mourn the 120 schoolchildren killed in Minab on the first day of the war. “Who builds a school next to a military compound?” she asked when we messaged in March. “The regime is to blame.” One of my relations in Tehran left me a voicemail around the same time, her voice quivering and finally breaking: “Even if I have to die for this regime to go, so be it.” Although it sounded bewildering, Trump may not have been lying when he said at a White House press conference in early April that he’d heard from “numerous” Iranians asking him to “please keep bombing.”

When the US and Iran agreed to a cease-fire on April 8, expatriate media broadcast protests by Iranians, who rallied in front of US embassies around the world in opposition to the talks. Iran International played voice messages from people in the country who lamented that the war had been left unfinished and expressed fear over the survival of the regime. “The Islamic Republic must go, one way or another. Let’s not forget the precious people who gave their lives for our freedom,” a caller from Mashhad pleaded. One International presenter posted on X: “Trump or Truman Plus? Maybe this is the ultimate solution to defeat the devil.” He deleted the post after considerable backlash—but kept arguing in his broadcasts that the war needed to continue until it had achieved its goal.

As the civilian death toll and the extent of infrastructural and environmental destruction in Iran became clearer, the loud pro-war hum quieted a little, both on the channels and on social media. But International continues to push for regime change, featuring statements from the belligerent senators Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton, who argued that the US should strike Iran’s energy infrastructure to “defang” the regime and return the country “to the civilized world.” In May the network also heavily featured Pahlavi’s statements at the POLITICO Security Summit, a conference sponsored by the weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin, where he urged Trump to “finish the job.” That same month, Morad Vaisi, the popular presenter for the program Siyasat (“politics”), concluded a show by saying, “The day is near when the criminal and corrupt occupier regime of the Islamic Republic will be toppled”—a nod to the claim by Pahlavi’s supporters that the regime, with its Islamist ideology, is not authentically Iranian. And as the US struck sites around Hormuz later in the month, International framed the fragile cease-fire as having been untenable all along. “Negotiations and attempts to change the bevahior of the Islamic Republic will not yield results,” Vaisi argued, echoing Pahlavi. “It must be overthrown.”

Iran International is not the first media project to seed an argument for regime change. Since the early 2010s the MEK—which has received funding from Saudi Arabia, according to its former head of security Massoud Khodabandeh—has operated what former members describe as a thousand-strong bot farm from its base in Albania. In 2016 its operators promoted the hashtags #IranRegimeChange and #FreeIran to push anti-Islamic Republic content from fake accounts designed to look like ordinary Iranians. Between 2017 and 2018 one such MEK persona, “Heshmat Alavi,” accumulated more than 70,000 followers on Twitter and placed dozens of articles in Forbes, The Hill, and other reputable, often right-leaning outlets, in which he condemned the Islamic Republic and called the MEK Iran’s “main opposition group.” The first Trump administration cited one of Alavi’s articles, which claimed that the Obama nuclear deal had enabled Iran to increase its military spending, when making the case for abandoning the agreement. It was not until the next year that The Intercept unmasked Alavi as a team of MEK operatives.

The Iranian information environment was perhaps particularly vulnerable to manipulation. The conditions of life in the country—including the brutality of the regime and the faltering of the nepotistic economy—have fostered deep discontent, and state media offers little in the way of credible news or information. One notorious primetime program, called 20:30 for its time of broadcast, even parades out supposed criminals—including, for example, an eighteen-year-old girl whose only transgression was posting videos of herself dancing on Instagram—to make them atone for their sins on live television; this practice is so entrenched that viewers refer to the so-called journalists involved as “interrogator-reporters.” State media has lost viewers for more frivolous reasons, too: archaic regulations, for instance, prohibit these channels from showing musical instruments, meaning they cannot air the pop concerts that are a fixture of public life in Iran. It’s little wonder that, in the GAMAAN survey, nearly half of respondents said they never or rarely watched Islamic Republic state media.

Before the proliferation of broadcasts from the diaspora, Iranians had few alternatives. The regime has prevented independent television channels from operating; when the prominent reformist politician Mehdi Karroubi attempted to establish one in 2005, he was famously denied a permit. Since the late 1990s it has been common for Iranians to install satellite dishes on their rooftops and beam in hundreds of channels via providers like Eutelsat and Nilesat. But for years BBC Persian TV, founded in 2009, was the only reliable Persian-language news source. And its standing in the country was complicated by a history of English intervention in Iranian affairs: the BBC’s Persian radio broadcasts have a central place in conspiracy theories that the English engineered the 1979 revolution, which drove millions into exile. In the 1980s those who believed that the UK used the station to support the clerical regime referred to it as “Ayatollah BBC.”

This information environment helped Iran International to amass its enormous audience—including not only, per the GAMAAN survey, the largest viewership in the country but also a significant though unspecified segment of Iran’s millions-strong diaspora. For these expatriate Iranians, many of whom are more comfortable in their native tongue than the language of their host country, International—with its colorful roster of news, talk shows, eyewitness reports and voice notes from Iran, and arts and culture coverage—offered a longed-for connection to the homeland.

Since International’s launch in 2017 the channel has had no trouble hiring Iranian journalists and broadcasters in the diaspora. Many on its roster were driven abroad after the regime either suppressed a wave of protests—such as the 2009 Green Uprising—or shut down their news outlets in Iran. Soon after International was incorporated, rumors spread that it had offered to double the salaries of journalists it was attempting to poach from BBC Persian and the US government-funded VOA Persian News Network (which has since drastically reduced its programming after a Trump executive order cut its grants in 2025). International’s funding has always been opaque, but such practices suggest that it has far deeper pockets not only than the state-funded outlets but than other privately backed Persian-language channels like Manoto TV (which was run by the British-Iranian couple Marjan and Kayvan Abbasi and closed down in May 2026 due to financial difficulties).

Despite the extent of its seed funding, International’s finances have lately seemed troubled. In December, just before the eruption of mass protests in Iran, it received 650 million pounds of debt relief from its anonymous shareholders, according to reporting by the Financial Times. In conversations with other journalists and academics who study Iran after the FT story appeared, I heard again and again the theory that this large infusion of funds was intended to supercharge pro-regime-change programming amid the protests and on the brink of what already seemed like an impending US–Israeli war against Iran.

Watching Iran International in February, I had little trouble seeing how the station had attracted so many viewers. It projects authority, with its polished sets and journalists who cut their teeth at Iran’s once-rigorous reformist newspapers. Vaisi, for example, now among the station’s most-watched presenters, was formerly an editor at Salam—one of the first regime-critical newspapers in post-revolutionary Iran, whose shutdown in 1999 led to a major student uprising. Last summer he garnered even more credibility by predicting Israel’s attack on Iran and its decapitation of Iranian military leaders an hour before it occurred.

After January’s mass killing of protestors, Vaisi honored the dead by reading twenty names each evening. Instead of referring to them by the Arabic word for martyr, shahid, which the regime uses when its own supporters are killed, he used the Persian term, janfada. This alone became a symbol, pitting Iranians against their Islamic government. Vaisi continues to name twenty martyrs each evening; what’s more, for months the station has run images of those killed in the protests throughout every program, in a column on the left-hand side of the screen. No such commemoration honors the victims of the US–Israeli war.

Even as International has pushed for regime change and the return of the Pahlavi monarchy, feeding into a sense of constant crisis, it has also functioned as a sort of emergency hotline where Iranians can connect and commiserate. Throughout the protests of January and February, the popular call-in show Program offered one of the only places where Iranians inside the country could transmit eyewitness accounts and on-the-ground perspectives to a large audience both within and beyond Iran’s borders. Iranians abroad, meanwhile, sent in searing voice messages for their friends and family inside the country, and International broadcast their hopes that their loved ones were alive and well.

As International was gaining a following in the late 2010s, a network of political actors began smearing Iran analysts who declined to endorse Trump’s regime-change agenda, accusing them of being Islamic Republic sympathizers. BBC Persian became a target of particular vitriol, and the moniker “Ayatollah BBC” soon started recirculating. These pile-ons were driven not only by MEK bots but by hawkish, often pro-Israel think tanks like the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and by expatriate anti-regime activists like Masih Alinejad, who until recently hosted a show on VOA Persian. International became a hub for these accusations, running programs investigating what they called the Islamic Republic’s “influence network,” in which they claimed that Iran had groomed a set of pro-regime analysts and pundits to lobby for them in the West. (These accusations have continued: in June The Free Pressran a piece by Jay Solomon—who previously teamed up with International to publish an investigation into the so-called influence operation in Semafor—suggesting that the US should deport the political analyst Trita Parsi. International soon picked up the story.)

Some of these denunciations were fueled by government funding. From 2018 to 2019, the US State Department funneled resources into a program called the Iran Disinformation Project, known as Iran Disinfo. Supposedly aimed at detecting false messaging in Iranian official rhetoric, the project largely focused on compiling and circulating long lists of Iran experts and journalists who questioned the push for war with the country, labeling them as regime operatives. Iran Disinfo especially targeted associates of the nonprofit cofounded by Parsi, the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), which advocated for diplomatic engagement with Tehran. They came up with hashtags like #NIACLobbies4Mullahs and used bot-driven influence campaigns to boost their own posts. Viral memes depicted supposed “regime lackeys” as cockroaches and rats, and Khamenei as the mother of all rodents. One post claimed that Parsi was a descendant of Navvab Safavi, the founder of a 1940s Iranian Islamist militant group that carried out a string of political assassinations of secularists and modernists. (Never mind that Parsi was born into a Zoroastrian family, not a Muslim one.) NIAC was smeared so thoroughly that the adjective “Niacy” became, in certain diaspora circles, a synonym for “Islamic Republic collaborator.” Prominent authors and analysts disassociated from NIAC amid this pressure—some publicly, like Reza Aslan, and others more quietly—and those who stayed received an avalanche of attacks and death threats, as Etan Mabourakh, NIAC’s organizing manager, told me in an interview.

Efforts to control the Iranian information environment intensified after September 2022. That month the death of the twenty-two-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman Mahsa Jina Amini in morality-police custody ignited what became known as the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising; for the first time in postrevolutionary Iran, protestors did not call for reform but demanded a wholesale overthrow of the state. The uprising was grassroots, democratic, universalist, and feminist. But within a year, it was coopted by forces eager to apply a pro-woman veneer to the project of Western intervention. In March 2023 Netanyahu gave an exclusive interview to International. “We are right there with you,” he told protesting Iranians. “Do not lose hope and stay strong.” Here was something new: a direct address by an Israeli prime minister to the people of Iran.

Iran ran disinformation campaigns of its own, and I myself became a target of one of them. In summer 2023, Iranian intelligence obtained a list of experts on the country compiled by the International Crisis Group. They claimed that the analysts on the list, myself included, made up a proposed shadow government that would soon be installed via an American-orchestrated coup. Our photos were printed on the front page of the Tehran Times, as I learned when a relative spotted me at a Tehran news stand. Certain pro-regime-change diaspora media, like the popular YouTube news program Koocheh, argued that the same list proved the opposite: that the Biden administration was working closely with Islamic Republic sympathizers to keep the regime in power. I found myself briefly a character in two contradictory conspiracy theories. This, I came to think, was exactly the point: not to convince anyone of a particular truth, but to trap millions of Iranians in a tangled web of stories that, however implausible, were just plausible enough to sow doubt.

The cast of spokespeople in the right-wing Iranian media environment is notably international, including prominent Israeli voices. By 2023 the relationship between Israel and Iran’s monarchists was growing closer, and Iran International was transmitting that newfound friendship to its large audience. That April Pahlavi made a visit to the state, where he met with Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog in what was described as an effort to “rebuild historic relations between Iran and Israel.” By 2024 Netanyahu was releasing videos on his social media in which he exhorted Iranians: “I hear your whispers. Woman, Life, Freedom.… Don’t lose hope, fight the regime.” Iran International featured his speeches and carried out exclusive interviews with him that were translated into Persian. In one of his most viral interviews, in the midst of the June 2025 war, Netanyahu told Iranians, “A light has been lit, carry it to freedom. The time of your freedom is soon.”

Israeli intelligence also funded online campaigns to manufacture the appearance of authentic Iranian support for the former crown prince. Investigations by the Israeli publicationsHa’aretz and TheMarker as well as the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto revealed coordinated campaigns—the groundwork for which was laid in 2023, though the work began in earnest in 2025—that used fake accounts, AI-generated content, and deepfake videos to push the idea that the Islamic Republic was weak and incite Iranians to revolt. One influence operation on X synchronized its activities with the Israeli Defense Forces’ June 2025 airstrikes on Evin Prison, urging Iranians to flood the notorious compound and free the prisoners.

That same summer, Israel ran another campaign attempting to induce defections of high-ranking officials from Iran’s armed forces: as Israel bombed Iranian nuclear sites, leaked recordings first published by The Washington Post showed calls from Israeli security services to Revolutionary Guard officers’ personal phones, in one instance exhorting an officer to denounce the Islamic Republic on video and flee the country within twelve hours, or expect to be assassinated along with his wife and children. Before the security services’ part in the campaign became public, Pahlavi sought to use the anticipated defections to his own advantage, announcing at a Paris press conference on the same day that he had established a secure online platform for defectors, and that approximately 50,000 Iranian military and intelligence personnel had already registered their intention to renounce the Islamic Republic. To date, the Pahlavi camp has not shared credible evidence of any defections, despite repeated requests from journalists and analysts.

In recent years—starting even before the June 2025 war—spokespeople for regime change via foreign intervention have multiplied. Pahlavi has remained foremost among them. But the former crown prince has been joined by a cohort of attractive, English-speaking women with hyphenated national identities and right-wing politics whose credibility stems largely from their Iranian heritage. They circulate through the online and cable TV debate circuit—Piers Morgan Uncensored, Fox News’s Hannity, and their equivalents—and get hundreds of thousands of views on their social media posts. Their rhetoric is often overtly Islamophobic, as in the case of the Iranian-Canadian activist Goldie Ghamari, who tweeted in March, “Mosques in occupied Iran are hubs of terrorism. Burn them down. Bomb them.” When the Iranian-American social media influencer Elica Le Bon appeared in April on TRIGGERnometry—a self-described British “free speech show” with 1.8 million global subscribers, a third of them in the US—she breezily tripled Pahlavi’s unverified defection numbers to 150,000. The show’s host visibly froze, then pressed her for a source. She replied with a charming smile that betrayed perhaps the slightest discomfort: “His team says that. How do we know? I can only tell you what his team says.”

These personalities’ maximalist line—in which anything is better than the Islamic Republic, even death—reverberates through Persian-language media. International frequently covers their combative encounters with political adversaries on English-language shows, multiplying the reach of their punditry. A heated exchange between Ghamari and The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur on Piers Morgan made this circuit, for example; expatriate media readily replayed the moment when, after Uygur denounced US military intervention, Ghamari broke into Persian to tell him to shut up and warned that “we’ll come after you after the regime falls.”

In February one of International’s most famous presenters, Pouria Zeraati, who had interviewed Netanyahu on the channel, posted an AI-generated fantasy of life after regime change on Instagram; it soon attracted 700,000 likes. The video showed Khomeini’s shrine outside of Tehran transformed into a glitzy casino, where the clientele threw darts decorated with the Israeli flag at a target of the ayatollah’s face. Trump and Netanyahu sat contentedly in a VIP room playing poker. Victory, the video suggested, had less to do with a people’s liberation than with US–Israeli domination.

Iranians have been trying to find words for the country’s predicament. The one that has stuck is estisal—a Persian word with an Arabic root and no precise English equivalent, meaning something like “having no options,” or being incapacitated by overwhelming forces, by life itself.

It was out of estisal that some Iranians chose war. Even before this winter, living conditions in Iran had collapsed under the combined weight of Trump’s maximum-pressure sanctions and the Islamic Republic’s own mismanagement and corruption. Emigration, once a reliable release valve for discontent, has been reduced to a trickle as the currency loses value and other countries impose visa bans and travel restrictions on Iranian nationals. This is only more devastating amid the corruption and nepotism that allocate jobs, permits, and business opportunities. A young, educated, worldly population has found itself unable to envision a future under the Islamic Republic—and, as GAMAAN’s polling from 2020 shows, has come to overwhelmingly support a secular government. Iranians have tried, with extraordinary persistence, to change things from within. No country in the Middle East has seen as many substantial uprisings in recent decades. But the results have been cosmetic so far: the greatest gain of the last few years is that women in many parts of Tehran no longer have to fear violent retaliation if they don’t cover up.

Estisal has also made Iranians vulnerable to media that turns their grief and fear into instruments of division. As the human rights lawyer Shadi Sadr put it in April on X, only when we can be angry and mourn the lives both of those killed in the January protests and of the schoolchildren killed in Minab—without letting the Pahlavis coopt the former and the Islamic Republic the latter—can we claim to belong to one nation. Until then, she said, we just happen to have been born in the same country.

The first step toward this kind of shared mourning might be the establishment of a free and open press. Iranians—who recently surfaced from the longest nationwide Internet shutdown in history—are creating small, precarious spaces for real conversation on new Internet talk and debate programs. Shows like Azad, Studio Patt, and Panorama have featured unprecedented discussions between politicians, academics, journalists, and analysts on sensitive topics such as the legitimacy of the ruling state, calls for war from within, and US-Iran relations. But these efforts have limited reach—with tens or hundreds of thousands of views across social media platforms, versus the tens of millions who watch the satellite channels—and could be shut down by the state at any moment. Meanwhile, the next time the regime spreads static, International will still beam into countless households, loud and clear.