Meta’s Oversight Board on Tuesday said it was considering investigating how the social media company has dealt with content supportive of Iran's ruling regime.
The independent board may assess whether Meta, owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, was correct to leave content online that many users had flagged as “co-ordinated inauthentic behaviour” shared on the platform by “state-sponsored influence operations”. This was said to have come from two Iran-linked accounts.
“Both pieces of content were posted by accounts with a code in their usernames that is associated with a pro-Iranian hacking group,” the board said. These accounts were created only two months before the content was posted.
“These signals, when combined with the nature of the content, suggest that these posts could be part of an online influence operation,” the board said.
One of the posts featured an image of a man in military clothing calling for calm and patience among citizens while the US was bombing parts of Iran in June 2025.
The other featured a video posted in January, as protests spread throughout Iran, that depicted a motorcycle convoy carrying Iranian security personnel. A caption read: “We are devoted and will sacrifice to this country and regime until our last breath.”
Meta’s Oversight Board was created in 2018 to provide independent supervision of its content moderation, particularly once users feel they have exhausted the company’s appeals process.
The board was created largely as a response to the deluge of inauthentic content originating from Russia that appeared in users' news feeds in the lead-up to the 2016 US presidential election.
Such content led to a number of congressional investigations and Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, testifying in Washington.
As for the content in question prompting a potential investigation, some users raised concerns with Meta at the time that the posts were a “co-ordinated attempt to promote and normalise violence, as well as act as ‘coercive propaganda’ which implicitly threatens Iranian dissenters”.
The board is accepting public comments on the matter before it decides whether to investigate Meta’s efforts to keep content on its platform.
Despite Iran cutting off internet access on several occasions – amid protests and, more recently, during strikes by the US and Israel – the country has been prolific in creating, sharing and driving social media content.
In April, YouTube told The National it had suspended an account sharing pro-Iran videos with the look and feel of The Lego Movie because of breaches of policy related to deception.
Meanwhile, Iran has also prioritised what has been considered nefarious cyber activities aimed at disrupting digital infrastructure in the US.
Handala, an Iran-linked hacker group, gained access to US FBI director Kash Patel’s personal email account and shared a number of photos and files belonging to him.
