AFP — Flooding the internet with posts from embassies across the world, sharing Lego videos mocking Donald Trump and even maintaining live accounts in the name of its slain supreme leader — Iran has charged headlong into the battlefield of social media.

Five weeks into the war against Israel and the United States, Iranian authorities have pulled out all the stops to aggressively promote the Islamic Republic’s narrative online.

Their efforts on X and other social media outlets are aimed at the outside world, given that X and most of its competitors have been blocked for years inside Iran, only accessible with the use of a VPN to circumvent internal censorship.

Most Iranians have barely had access to the worldwide web at all since the outbreak of the war on February 28, due to what monitor Netblocks terms an “internet blackout” that has now lasted 39 days.

But this does not prevent select “whitelisted” officials from using social media platforms like X as weapons in the propaganda war, even as they remain blocked to ordinary Iranians, in a double standard that has enraged digital rights activists.

Embassies overseas are also getting in on the action, with certain Trump posts sending sometimes-dormant accounts into a frenzy.

When the US leader issued an expletive-laden rant at the Islamic Republic, threatening consequences if it did not reopen the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s embassy in Zimbabwe quipped: “We’ve lost the keys.”

We've lost the keys. Advertisement if(typeof rgb_remove_toi_dfp_banner != "function" || !rgb_remove_toi_dfp_banner("#336x280_Middle_1")){ window.tude = window.tude || { cmd: [] }; tude.cmd.push(function() { if(navigator.userAgent.indexOf("rgbmedia-app") > -1){ tude.setDeviceType("mobile"); } tude.refreshAdsViaDivMappings([ { divId: '336x280_Middle_1', baseDivId: '336x280_Middle_1', } ]); }); } — Iran Embassy in Zimbabwe (@IRANinZIMBABWE) April 5, 2026

— Iran Embassy in Zimbabwe (@IRANinZIMBABWE) April 5, 2026

Referring to a previous threat by Trump to send Iran back to the “Stone Ages,” the embassy in Thailand added: “Judging by how POTUS swears like a teenager, it seems the US has reached the Stone Age sooner than expected.”

Iran’s embassy in the UK, meanwhile, shared a quote it attributed to the famed American author Mark Twain: “It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”

تیغ دادن دَر کَفِ زَنگیِ مَستبِهْ که آیَد عِلم،........

© The Times of Israel