Iran's Internet Blackout Accidentally Revealed Coordinated Narrative in the West
When Israel attacked Iran, several Scottish independence accounts went dark—at the same time Iran's internet collapsed.
This wasn’t a one-off. It was a proof of concept: Foreign and domestic actors are actively weaponizing social media to manipulate public opinion, and they’re using the platforms we trust to do it.
Seeing it happen—live—was surreal. I always suspected this was going on. But witnessing it? Seeing the curtain slip? And no one cares? That shook me.
So I asked Grok, the AI built into X:
“Why hasn’t AI been used to track the origin of political phrases, coordinated narratives, and synthetic consensus?”
Grok’s answer?
“I could, given the right data and a nudge.”
Think about that. The AI admits:
It can trace who seeded a narrative
Map who echoed it in seconds
Detect fake consensus driven by coordinated networks
But then it drops the real bomb:
“I don’t run real-time propaganda trackers—though I could.”
That’s not just capability. That’s power without accountability.
And why won’t it be deployed?
Because doing so would reveal that platform discourse isn’t organic. It’s curated. Shaped. Injected. And someone doesn’t want us to know that.
This isn’t a tech limitation. It’s a will problem. A trust problem. And yeah—a moral problem.
If we don’t demand transparency from the systems shaping our minds, we’re not just being manipulated. We’re volunteering for it.
Just scrape the posting activity of specific accounts, and find a way to weed out automated posts to get actual activity. Then scrape the uptimes of Iranian (or other country; to detect when their internet goes down) websites and see if there is any correlation between downtimes and posting dips.
The nature of X is that it supports all kinds of breathless overthinking and overreaction. Just turn it off.