Iran’s Futile but Revealing Attempts to Influence U.S. Campus Protests

In July, the White House issued a warning that Iran was attempting to exploit Gaza protests in the U.S. The Director of National Intelligence had also released a statement highlighting the increasing aggressive efforts of Iran’s foreign influence campaigns, and warning about initiatives aimed at inciting American citizens.

Over the years, Iranian media, officials, and the country’s Supreme Leader himself have repeatedly tried to influence international public opinion against Israel and take credit for movements they perceive as in line with the Islamic Republic’s interest—so much so that high-ranking clerics in Iran even call the recent Gaza protests on U.S. university campuses "the export of the Islamic Revolution to America."

It's hard to say exactly how much power Iran actually holds to sway public discourse on the subject of Palestine-Israel politics. In fact, most of the Islamic Republic’s efforts don’t seem to make that many ripples.

But its tactics are worth dissecting, in order to understand foreign influence campaigns targeting youth in the U.S. and how these operations—even when they are not successful in attracting the intended international audience—do feed into domestic propaganda within Iran.

Social media campaigns

One such campaign was “Letters from Leader.” In 2015 and 2024 respectively, Ali Khamenei, who holds the title of Supreme Leader of Iran, wrote online open letters addressing youth in the West. The 2015 letters were in response to widespread anti-Muslim sentiment in the West after the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris. The 2024 version was about the Palestine-Israel conflicts, and titled “As the page of history is turning, you are standing on the right side of it.”

On social media, the letters were systematically promoted by supporters of the Supreme Leader with hashtags like #LetterFromLeader and #LETTER4U. Research conducted by my colleagues at the Persian-language fact-checking project, Factnameh, found signs of coordinated inauthentic behaviors: One promotional strategy employed by accounts on X (formerly Twitter) was "copypasta," where accounts post identical or similar messages using specific hashtags to promote a tweet. In addition, around ten percent of the randomly selected 4,530 X accounts involved in the campaign were newly created in 2024; many shared common phrases in their profile bios. Meta's own investigations have also discovered Iranian government-affiliated coordinated inauthentic behaviors on Facebook and Instagram in the past.

Despite all this promotion, the letters from Khamenei did not receive much attention outside of Iran. Inside the country, however, authorities used the opportunity to propagate the idea of the Islamic Republic’s supposed influence among youth in North America and Europe. A recent report published by an Iranian Armed Forces-affiliated website went as far as to state that "The root of the recent developments (protests since October 7th, 2023) in universities across the United States and Europe can be traced back to a letter written 10 years ago by the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution. It is hoped that these movements will lead to profound transformations globally."

Cyber-enabled influence operations

As conflicts in the Middle East continue to escalate, Iran has also accelerated its Cyber-enabled Influence Operations (IOs). A Microsoft Security Insider report published in February indicates that the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel marked a turning point in Iran’s cyber influence operations. The report, titled “Iran surges cyber-enabled influence operations in support of Hamas,” referenced increased trends in impersonation of activists and victims, cyberattacks on Israeli (and their allies’) infrastructure, distributing false warnings through bulk text messaging and emails, to name a few.

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According to the report, these operations sought to achieve four core objectives: destabilization, retaliation, intimidation, and undermining international support for Israel. Perpetrators such as Cotton Sandstorm, an Iranian cyber threat that has ties with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), have carried out attacks on companies and infrastructure in Israel and beyond, while promoting their activities as an act “for humanity” and “for Palestinian.” One such attack was the hacking of Israeli-made programmable logic controllers in November 2023, which temporarily took Pennsylvania’s water distribution system offline.

Offline influence operations

There’s also evidence that Iran’s overseas influence operations extend beyond the digital realm. The Islamic Republic is adept at utilizing cultural institutions established across the globe for its messaging. For instance, the Islamic Culture and Communication Organization, which is affiliated to Iran’s Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, operates in 64 locations worldwide and receives millions of dollars annually to “promote the discourse of the Islamic Revolution.” Many of the Organization’s activities are organized by military and security forces centered around the Quds Force, a branch of the IRGC that operates beyond Iran's borders. On April 26, 2024, the Organization publicly called on "all universities, academic, and cultural centers worldwide," including those in the U.S., to escalate protests against Israel.

Reports also indicate that over the past two decades, the organization has sent an average of 1,500 individuals abroad annually as "religious elites" and "missionaries.” On top of this, numerous high-ranking individuals with military and political backgrounds have been students and researchers at prominent universities and institutions in the West, where they may learn the pressure points that are most effective in open societies.

Consider the 2017 campaign centered around the story of Mohsen Dehnavi, After he was denied entry at the Boston airport, a high-profile media campaign was launched, describing him only as a medical researcher traveling with his family to a position, and blaming the incident on the “Muslim travel ban” enacted by the then-President Donald Trump. The campaign was covered by major media outlets, including BBC and The Guardian. It later emerged that Dehnavi had been head of Sharif Univeristy’s student Basij, the paramilitary volunteer militia that is part of the IRGC, and deployed to confront protestors and enforce regime dominance.

At the end of the day, the answer to the question “Does Iran have an influence on student movements in the U.S.?” is not as simple as yes or no. While there is no hard evidence yet that Iran played an active role in organizing the recent student protests, the Islamic Republic does not shy from using public sentiments in the West to its advantage. And with its long history of influence and sabotage operations both online and offline, Iran’s potential in shaping the ongoing Israel-Palestine debates in the West cannot be overlooked.