In the spring of 2026, four different observers looked at the same thing and arrived at the same conclusion.
The first was Renée DiResta, a researcher who has spent years studying how information operations work, writing in Time magazine in March. Her frame: that in the current conflict, "people encounter war first as content, and only later, if at all, as news." Not the reverse. Content first. The war is a thing that happens in your feed before it is a thing that happens in the world. By the time you encounter a journalist's report about a specific strike, you have already been shaped — by memes, clips, comment threads, repost chains — into a reader who interprets that report through a frame they received from the content.
The second was a journal paper. The Oxford Journal of Digital Conflict published, in February 2026, the first peer-reviewed attempt to describe what was happening in the Iran-US conflict from the perspective of information operations. Their term was participatory propaganda at scale. Their thesis: that AI tools had compressed the production costs of state-grade propaganda to the point where independent actors — not just governments — could produce it, and that the distinction between state propaganda and organic content had therefore become operationally meaningless.