What Iran’s Internet Blackout and the Patagonia Fires Revealed About Global Disinformation

The lie that raced across social media during Argentina’s recent Patagonia wildfires was not just grotesque. It was revealing.

Within hours, recycled images and viral posts blamed Israelis for igniting the fires. The language was familiar: vague references to “foreign states,” insinuations of coordination, and the ritual refrain that “the media” was covering it up. Argentine journalists documented how quickly the fires became a vehicle for antisemitic conspiracy theories, including false claims involving an “IDF grenade” in Patagonia.

Days later, a seemingly unrelated anomaly appeared in Europe. A cluster of pro-Scottish independence accounts on X, previously prolific, fell abruptly silent. Their disappearance coincided precisely with Iran’s imposition of a nationwide Internet shutdown amid domestic anti-regime protests. British reporting and independent researchers had already identified many of these accounts as part of an Iranian-linked influence operation masquerading as Scottish voices. When Tehran pulled the plug at home, the “Scots” abroad went quiet too.

Two continents. Two narratives. One underlying mechanism.

Authoritarian regimes — and the ecosystem of state media, proxy outlets, and cutout accounts they cultivate — are pushing democratic societies along their fault lines. Increasingly, Israel is authoritarian regimes’ accelerant of choice.

Influence operations are often exposed by sloppy tradecraft: recycled phrasing, unnatural engagement patterns, or accounts created in batches. But recent platform transparency has added a more revealing diagnostic: origin.

As researchers gained better tools to determine where accounts actually operate, a striking pattern emerged. Accounts branding themselves as “MAGA,” hyper-focused on American culture-war issues, were frequently traced to Bangladesh. Accounts claiming to post from Gaza — offering supposedly raw, on-the-ground testimony during the war — were often operating from Pakistan or Indonesia.

This matters because it punctures a central illusion of the online age: that what feels like organic, local outrage usually isn’t. Much of it is, in fact, geographically divorced from the societies it claims to represent.

Iran’s January 2026 Internet shutdown and its cyber iron curtain made this impossible to ignore. When Tehran cut connectivity nationwide, clusters of supposedly local voices in Western democracies stopped posting. The blackout did not merely suppress dissent inside Iran; it exposed the scaffolding of external influence operations. When the lights go out at headquarters, the field offices go dark too.

Once you see the pattern, the choice of disguises stops looking random.

Democracies argue in public. That is not a flaw. It is the point, and it is precisely what authoritarian systems exploit.

Separatist politics, immigration debates, populist movements, and foreign conflicts provide ready-made content pipelines. Operators do not need to invent controversies; they need only to impersonate participants and intensify the most divisive frames through distortion, omission, and outright falsehood.

The Scottish case is illustrative, not exceptional. The same architecture animates accounts posing as Midwestern Americans furious about election integrity, or as desperate Gazans posting emotionally fluent English from thousands of miles away. The objective is not persuasion in any classical sense. It is erosion — of trust, cohesion, and confidence that democratic disagreement reflects real people rather than staged performance.

So why did an environmental disaster in Argentina metastasize so quickly into an “Israeli plot”?

Because Israel is uniquely useful to anti-Western authoritarians.

Israel sits at the convergence of several propaganda imperatives. It is framed as a Western-aligned democracy in a region hostile to that model — making it a proxy target for liberal democracy itself. It allows classic antisemitic conspiracies — hidden power, omnipresent influence, coordinated deception — to be laundered through the more respectable language of “anti-Zionism.” And it offers moral intoxication: if Israel is cast as a singular source of global evil, then every crisis, anywhere, can be folded into a pre-existing narrative of resistance to that evil.

Coverage of the Patagonia fires demonstrated this dynamic precisely. Israel was inserted reflexively into an unrelated catastrophe because audiences had already been conditioned to accept Israel-blame as plausible background noise. The speed was the point.

These narratives are not born on social media alone. They move through a supply chain.

At one end are state broadcasters and aligned outlets — Tehran, Moscow, Doha, Beijing — each with its own tone but a shared objective: undermine trust in Western institutions and normalize cynicism or outright hostility toward democratic governance. At the other end are social platforms, where content is stripped of provenance and redistributed as “what ordinary people are saying.”

These regimes often fit a familiar pattern: control information distribution at home, and export confusion abroad. When regimes clamp down domestically, they often compensate by escalating external information warfare. Destabilizing other societies becomes a way to offset internal fragility.

If the volume of Israel-related falsehoods feels overwhelming, that sensation is intentional.

The Scottish accounts that vanished, the Bangladesh-based “MAGA” profiles, the Pakistan- and Indonesia-based “Gaza voices,” and the Patagonia wildfire conspiracy are not separate scandals. They are iterations of the same method: impersonation, amplification, moral outrage, repeat.

The temptation is to treat each viral lie as a discrete incident: debunk it, move on.

But the pattern is systemic.

Israel is not merely a target in this ecosystem. It is a tool — the tip of the spear in a broader campaign designed to erode confidence not only in Israel, but in the legitimacy of democratic societies themselves.

Israel is the test case — but free societies are the ultimate target.

Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.