I broadly agree. However, there’s an additional reason of the many correct ones you pointed out. Iranian messaging is poor, conflicting, and quite often irrational boasting.
As I’ve said millions of times before until the IRI cleans up its messaging act it will continue to deliver self-goals to its opponents while making life difficult for its proponents.
What you see is fatigue resulting from the flotsam and jetsam of IRI messaging.
In order to be able to gauge this hypothesis, I would need a breakdown of your reasoning with regards to the concrete example at hand. What are the precise characteristics of Iran's messaging on enemy sabotage / terrorism and on the success of security forces in neutralizing sabotage / terrorism? How do said characteristics lead to fatigue with users of this forum? How does fatigue in turn make users who are supposed to be intelligent and patriotic enough, apply the irrational double-standard I highlighted (what I basically did, was to notice a blatant discrepancy, I did not establish a causality as far as I can tell), and how can they fail to realize their own negative bias in this matter?
This said, I am of the belief (and have expressed my take in the past) that whatever statements Iranian officials make, it won't suffice to counterbalance the enemy's colossal propaganda-cum-censorship machinery. Basically, the overwhelming bulk of media and internet belong to the enemy and are colonized by its footmen in and outside Iran. Given the enemy's insurmountable resource advantage, dissenting voices including the Islamic Republic's will be drowned out at any rate.
I have been observing this kind of phenomenon in relation to a select few dissident movements in the west, whose communication output at the intellectual level and in terms of persuasion power would literally dwarf almost anything Iranians are usually exposed to, including the enemy's most professional psy-ops centers à la BBC or anti-Iranian academia. Nevertheless the powers to be know - through a combination of repression, flooding and more insidiously through social engineering, how to keep the broader public from adhering to the messages emitted by the movements in question.
Compounding the matter, a successful formula for irregular / guerilla / asymmetric warfare in the informational and soft power realm is yet to emerge. Simply put, while successful asymmetric Resistance and deterrence is possible in the area of military and hard power (including messaging directly aimed at impacting the battlefield), there is no such thing as asymmetric information warfare or asymmetric social engineering. Here, sheer quantity and control of loudspeakers is the critical factor, and it will always trump quality and fundamental operational doctrine. There are a number of friendly commentators who, it would seem, might be putting too much hope on what is in fact an impracticable ideal type of re-information and more deeply, of
farhangsāzi.
A third issue is how form affects the essence of messaging, not to mention the social body itself. If you format your communication according to the dominant norms of Hollywoodesque shallowness, the enemy will be victorious already. You cannot convey the Revolution's lofty principles and the justness of its struggle through a media ecosystem where access to information becomes synonymous with impulsive consumerism and satisfaction of desires i.e. the modus operandi of the contemporary capitalism mode of production with its libertarian-liberal face, which Clouscard masterfully conceptualized under the designation capitalism of desire. You give in on this, you have lost to the enemy already.
en.wikipedia.org
The solution thus does not reside in improving messaging as long as gates are left open for the enemy to poison the environment with its suffocating propaganda apparatus, its disproportionate vectors of cultural aggression and social engineering. The way to go is to shut down these infiltration channels and their subversive domestic relays (under many aspects, disinformation and psychological warfare is fraught with as much peril as kinetic aggression). In certain relevant instances taking a leaf out of western regimes' own book would suffice. Then and only then can refinement of the revolutionary camp's in-house PR incrementally bear fruit.
new.thecradle.co
