A grainy video appears to show a line of blindfolded young girls parading past an underwear-clad Donald Trump. A girl’s anguished voice cries out in German. The video cuts to scenes of Trump and other famous figures talking with the late child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
“This video is not fake,” said a post on X from an account called HDX News that was viewed more than 6.8 million times. “These pedophile perverts started a war so that this wouldn’t be talked about.”
The video is indeed fake, disinformation researchers say. And the account is part of a pro-Iran propaganda network that has found viral success by tapping into the conspiracy theory that Trump attacked Iran to distract the public from the Epstein files.
To erode public support for the joint U.S.-Israel military operation, Iranian state media has sought to portray those countries’ leaders as part of a corrupt and depraved “Epstein class” or “Epstein regime.” While such content often fails to gain much traction outside Iran, the message is spreading through generically named “news” accounts that researchers say appear to be using the Epstein conspiracy theories to serve pro-Iran talking points to a global audience.
“There is a lot of Epstein-related content being pushed out to draw eyeballs,” said Bret Schafer, who directs U.S. research and policy at the nonprofit Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD). The logic: “You come for the Epstein content, and you stay for the propaganda.”
The Epstein posts are part of a maelstrom of Iran-related misinformation that has engulfed social media since Feb. 28, when strikes by the United States and Israel killed the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and touched off a conflict that has spread across the Middle East. Mixed in with real footage of the conflict are dramatic videos of missile strikes, downed fighter jets and earth-shaking explosions that have racked up millions of views on X, TikTok, Instagram and Telegram, only to be debunked as AI-generated fakes, real footage from past conflicts being passed off as new, or scenes from video games.
HDX News was part of a network of at least 15 anonymous X accounts churning out content that aligns with the messaging of Iran’s Islamist regime and resharing one another’s posts, according to ISD researchers who identified the campaign. Another, called GPX News, posted the same fake Epstein video — a mishmash of imaginary, AI-generated scenes with bits of real footage — and received more than 4.7 million views, according to X’s publicly viewable metrics.
“The White House is aware of attempts by the Iranian regime to influence public opinion in the United States, which is why we have consistently warned the fake news against being used by these bad actors and amplifying their propaganda,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said Monday.
Both accounts were suspended by X after The Post reached out for comment, though others in the network remained active as of Monday. X did not respond other than asking for examples of the posts and accounts.
Schafer said it’s not clear whether the accounts are working on behalf of Iran’s government or merely support it. But he added that the pro-regime propaganda they promoted was “not subtle.”
Their posts included triumphant reports of successful Iranian strikes on American and Israeli targets; calls for followers to “stand with Iran”; and suggestions that China and Russia stand ready to back Iran in a cataclysmic world war. All 15 accounts ISD found were created in the past two years, and nine of them were verified on X, meaning they pay a subscription fee to Elon Musk’s social network in return for features that can include greater visibility, a blue checkmark verifying their authenticity and the chance to generate revenue from their posts.
Both of the accounts that posted the fake Epstein video have also generated some engagement on X with explicitly antisemitic and even pro-Nazi posts. HDX News got more than a thousand “likes” on an apparently AI-generated video of a bearded Jewish man holding an Israeli flag laughing as he dances through a field of graves studded with American flags. A third account from the network, called GPX Press, received more than 27,000 likes and 2.6 million views on a post showing a video of an Adolf Hitler speech, to which it added the message: “Today, the world has truly discovered why Hitler killed the Jews.”
Last week, X’s head of product, Nikita Bier, announced that users who post “AI-generated videos of an armed conflict” without a disclosure would be suspended for 90 days from making money on the platform, with subsequent violations triggering a permanent ban. Bier said the company would use Community Notes and other signals to identify such AI-generated content.
“During times of war, it is critical that people have access to authentic information on the ground,” Bier said in an X post. “We will continue to refine our policies and product to ensure X can be trusted during these critical moments.”
It was not clear whether the pro-Iran accounts were suspended for violating the new policy or a preexisting X rule.
The conflict has also sparked a sharp rise in antisemitic content, according to researchers from the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish civil rights organization — some of it seeking to link Epstein, who was Jewish, to the conflict.
“Pretty quickly after the conflict began, this conspiratorial rebranding of Operation Epic Fury” — the U.S. military’s official name — into ‘Operation Epstein Fury’ started circulating on social media platforms,” said Oren Segal, the ADL’s senior vice president of counter-extremism and intelligence. An ADL report found that the phrase “Epstein Fury” was mentioned more than 90,000 times by some 60,000 different accounts on X within the conflict’s first three days.
It isn’t only pro-Tehran accounts that are drawing those connections. Hours after the strikes, Candace Owens, the American right-wing political commentator who has more than 5.9 million subscribers on YouTube, re-shared a post on X that included an AI-generated image of Trump flanked by Israel flags and suggested that the United States was “blowing up” Iranians because it’s “controlled by” Jews. Owens added her own caption: “Operation Epstein Fury fully explained.”
At least one of the accounts in the pro-Tehran network on X reshared a post by Owens that accused Israel of orchestrating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Segal said the problem with online antisemitism is not only that it is hurtful but that it is often accompanied by real-world harassment, threats and violent attacks on Jewish people in the United States and around the world.
Asked whether she stands by her posts, how she felt about her posts being shared by a pro-Iran propaganda account, and her reaction to Segal’s concern that she was fueling antisemitism, Owens said via e-mail: “Of course I stand by my post. Israel is a filthy, terrorist state that mass murders children and Christians.”
Other disinformation researchers have also taken note of the campaign to link U.S. and Israeli leaders to Epstein. Posts on X that used the phrase “Epstein regime” — a derogatory reference to the U.S.-Israel alliance — increased one hundred-fold on the first day of the missile strikes, said Emerson Brooking, director of strategy at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. Several of the most popular posts to use the phrase came from Owens.
While many liberal-leaning users have left X since Musk bought it, Brooking said, the network remains highly influential in geopolitics, partly due to its popularity among Republican leaders, right-wing influencers and the MAGA base. X is banned in Iran, yet the country’s leaders — including Khamenei and former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — have long maintained accounts to project their messaging to the wider world, he said.
Brooking said the impact of any given piece of propaganda or disinformation may be limited, even if it finds a large audience. But in aggregate, they can spur shifts in public opinion over time, especially when they reinforce narratives — such as the idea that Trump attacked Iran to distract from the Epstein files — that many people were already inclined to believe.
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