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On the morning of Aug. 5, an anonymous account on X in India posted seemingly sensational news. The commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps had vowed that his country would never give up its nuclear weapon ambitions as long as Israel and the United States possessed those weapons, the account said.
It was not true, and there’s no evidence that the commander made the remark or that Iran has developed nuclear weapons. The claim soon caromed around the internet anyway.
The quotation appeared on Israeli accounts, and then a television channel there posted it, calling it the first public declaration that Iran was working to build a nuclear bomb. That evening, it made its way into remarks that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered at Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, the country’s national cemetery.
In the United States, Mike Waltz, the Trump administration’s ambassador to the United Nations, reposted the quotation, as did Senator Rick Scott of Florida, a Republican. Fox News also reported the claim, as anchors and guests cited it as evidence of Iran’s duplicity.
The quotation, attributed to Brig. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, was part of a campaign that succeeded in misleading politicians and news organizations around the world, according to a review by The New York Times. The claim’s spread showed how easily viral disinformation can twist the public debate over matters as serious as war and peace.
It is unclear who fabricated the quotation. However, it appeared intended to bolster Mr. Netanyahu’s longstanding claim that Iran is determined to build a nuclear weapon and that war against Iran was necessary.
President Trump, who had tried to justify the war by citing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, has been searching for a way out of it, and the quotation went viral three days after he said he was halting all attacks on Iran to give peace negotiations a chance.
“This quote was clearly crafted to drive a wedge into peace negotiations,” said Darren L. Linvill of the Media Forensics Hub at Clemson University, who tracks how disinformation and propaganda spread on social media.
Iran’s nuclear program has been a source of international concern and diplomacy for three decades, but the country’s officials have maintained that it has a civilian, not a military, focus. The status of Iran’s nuclear development remains unclear.
The spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry, Esmail Baghaei, criticized the fake post, calling it “an example of the flood of lies against the Islamic republic.” He blamed Israel, but did not cite evidence.
“The allegations of a link to a nuclear bomb are based on the same thing, a lie they have been feeding the international community for 20 years to justify military aggression,” he told reporters on Sunday.
General Vahidi, who took over command of the Revolutionary Guards in March, has issued numerous statements about the war since it started but not about Iran’s nuclear program. Last year, he addressed the topic in an interview with state media after a 12-day conflict with Israel that culminated in American airstrikes. While Iran would “do things it has not done previously” to defend itself, he said, the country’s position on nuclear weapons “has been stated with complete clarity in the past.”
Questions about the origins of the claim were first reported by Ynet, an Israeli news outlet. Since then, new details about how it spread so widely have emerged.
The first known appearance of the quotation — on the Indian account on X — had numerous red flags. The account, which has 175,000 followers, has been criticized by fact-checkers and the government of Pakistan for sharing false and Islamophobic content.
The quotation was accompanied by a picture of General Vahidi and a cartoonish, A.I.-generated mushroom cloud. The English text contained spelling and grammatical errors.
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Funeral ceremonies for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, in Tehran in July. Credit…Arash Khamooshi/Polaris for The New York Times
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