Seyed Mohammad Marandi is an Iranian-US academic, intellectual and political analyst. Photo: MintPress News/file photo.
By Alan Macleod – Mar 26, 2026
Shadowy pro-Israel group Terror Alarm is crowdfunding a $1 million bounty for the capture of a well-known Iranian academic and media personality – and Twitter is refusing to remove it. But who are Terror Alarm? MintPress traces the company back to its source and exposes its role as a private security firm.
Last week, the official Terror Alarm Twitter account posted a direct threat to Professor Seyed Mohammad Marandi, writing:
“We are crowdfunding $1 million for a bounty for the capture of Mohammad Marandi, advisor to Iran’s Supreme Leader and frequent IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps]-aligned propagandist. We want him alive.”
Not only was it not taken down, despite hundreds of users attempting to alert Twitter to the post, it was also promoted as “paid partnership,” meaning that the platform itself was profiting from the incitement.
A Shady, Contradictory Company
Founded in 2016, Terror Alarm publishes low-quality, A.I.-generated news across social media. It has built up a significant global following, including over a quarter of a million followers on Twitter (where it has changed its name four times already), and a Telegram channel with 36,000 subscribers.
Its dealings, including its funding, are kept shrouded in secrecy. However, it has previously advertised in-house software jobs based in Denmark, Romania, and Spain, which, they note, require a degree from a European technical university, fluency in English, and to have lived in a NATO member state for the past seven years.
Another posting on Telegram noted that, “TV Studio jobs available in Romania, Ukraine, Denmark, Sweden and Lithuania.” To qualify, it states, “You need to be Pro-Israel, Zionist, and speak fluent English.”
Although at first glance, the group appears to be simply another low-quality content farm, searching through archived versions of the company’s (now offline) website via the Internet Wayback Machine reveals that Terror Alarm is far more than that.
The company has gone through a number of facelifts. It began as a supposedly anti-terror app, before rebranding as a private security firm, and then, finally, becoming an E.U.-registered NGO.
Describing itself as a “highly accredited private security firm that not only alerted authorities about terrorist attacks as they happened but also helped thwart many acts of terror at the height of the 2014-2017 ISIS attacks in Europe,” it offers a variety of security services, including private bodyguarding, background checks, legal service, brand protection, and evidence compilation.
Terror Alarm has removed its website from the Internet. But according to a previous version accessed via the Wayback Machine, the group has three core missions:
1- Intelligence sharing with Free World governments,
2- Combating antisemitism through A.I.-driven monitoring and response,
3- Preventing terrorist attacks through predictive A.I. analysis.
The third of these missions is particularly controversial, and amounts to a Minority Report-style judgment on pre-crimes. As the company itself explains, its technology scours the internet and “continuously scans digital activity using predictive A.I. to detect early signs of radicalization or extremist association.” It then alerts authorities and initiates a “pre-configured ‘digital lockdown’” to “enable proactive counter-radicalization.”
In short, Terror Alarm promotes itself as a service that can predict who will carry out attacks, based on their social media posts, and can share that information with governments and police forces. However, its own source code, netizens have exposed, dictates which groups are considered worthy of support and which are “opposed entities.” While the UAE, Turkey, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Israel and “Jews and Zionists worldwide” are considered positive groups, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, the Chinese Communist Party are all placed on their own private terrorist list.
Defending and Supporting Israel, From Denmark
As the list suggests, Terror Alarm is a fundamentally pro-Israel organization, and it clearly has strong ties to the Ethno-Jewish state. To begin with, the contact details displayed on an archived version of its website includes a +972 (Israeli) phone number. It also used to post an inordinate amount of content relevant only to Israelis, such as articles titled “Israeli tourists detained indefinitely in Turkey for photographing the city!” and “Hanukkah 2021 and what it means for the IDF.” Indeed, in one Archive.org capture, the company’s strapline was “Counter-Terrorism and Breaking News from Jerusalem, Israel.” Moreover, the company only allows Jews to be appointed to its board.
However, the organization is not registered in Israel, but in Denmark. Journalist Freddie Ponton found that local records list businessman René Rønneberg as Terror Alarm’s official representative. Rønneberg has been a director of a number of small Danish businesses, including BEZH Denmark ApS, a company partially owned by Avi Simonsen, a man who, despite his name, was born in Iran in 1977, just before the Islamic Revolution.
Little is known about either of these characters, who both keep an extremely low profile online. Yet their political outlook can be guessed at from looking at Terror Alarm’s output.
Strangely, for such an overtly political organization, it insists that it is entirely neutral. “We have no ‘agenda’ except to prevent acts of terror. Most of the tweets on our @Terror_Alarm Twitter feed are AI-generated and as such, they are technically mostly agenda-free tweets,” it writes, as if A.I. is a purely neutral tool, adding that:
“We report only the facts and not a personal attitude toward the facts. We do use our connections to get the news but we will not be on either side of any argument and we normally do not disclose the sources.”
And yet, it openly announced its enthusiastic support for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, or what it called Israel’s mission to “transform Gaza from a war-torn region into a place of peace and prosperity.” It also calls for the United States to “deploy troops to assist in the humanitarian mission of relocating Palestinians to countries willing to offer refuge (Most Palestinians are originally from Jordan and Egypt).”
Israel-Backed Rioters Fail Regime-Change Operation: Interview With Dr. Mohammad Marandi
Media Blackouts and Propaganda Wars
The public response to Terror Alarm’s attempts to kidnap a well-known Iranian-American academic was overwhelmingly one of outrage.
“This is a reprehensible post for X to allow, targeting Marandi and putting a bounty on him. It is also a ‘Paid partnership.’ Imagine the outcry if a pro-Palestinian or pro-Iranian group did this with Israelis or Americans. Criminal charges would be filed,” wrote Drop Site News’ Jeremy Scahill. “Try to do one of these about an Israeli or American professor tied to the war and see how long it takes before your post or even account is banned,” reacted journalist Glenn Greenwald. Hundreds of people attempted to contact Twitter, but the company has not responded.
Despite the incident going viral, it has been entirely ignored by corporate media. A search for “Marandi” or “Terror Alarm” into the Dow Jones Factiva news database elicited zero relevant results in The New York Times, CNN, Fox News, CBS News, The Washington Post, or any American news outlet. As of March 26, only The Canary and 21st Century Wire – two small independent online sites – have covered the story.
This cannot be because Professor Marandi is not known to journalists at big networks. Born in the United States and rising to become professor of English Literature and Orientalism at Tehran University, Marandi’s excellent command of the English language and his sharp debating skills have made him a regular guest on big networks such as the BBC or CNN.
A military veteran and an advisor to the Iranian government’s nuclear negotiation team, he has become the go-to face on television espousing Iran’s point of view in English. This has earned him widespread notoriety, with supporters enjoying his wit and his ability to dress down oppositional interviewers, and detractors seeing him as the spokesperson for a dictatorship.
Marandi has become a particularly common face on TV news across the world since the most recent U.S./Israeli attack on Iran. On February 28, coordinated American and Israeli attacks hit Iran and assassinated its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Western missiles pounded the country, hitting government and military installations, as well as schools and hospitals.
Iran fired back, targeting American bases across the region, and closed the Strait of Hormuz, effectively crippling the global economy. The result was chaos. Much of the world’s oil and gas supply has been halted, leading to fears of electricity and food shortages, as well as a prolonged global depression.
President Trump appeared blindsighted by the response, and immediately called on his NATO allies to join the U.S. in a mission to reopen the narrow sea passage between Iran and Arabia. Their response, however, was far from enthusiastic. And with Washington’s Gulf allies sounding the alarm about the dire economic and social consequences of a prolonged engagement, it appears Trump might be forced into a humiliating climb down.
Washington can still rely on support from big social media platforms such as Twitter, however. The company was bought in 2022 by Elon Musk, a tech mogul and Pentagon contractor who made his money partnering with the U.S. national security state. Musk’s companies have secured billions in contracts with the C.I.A. and U.S. military. In 2023, he signalled his full support for Israel in its campaign against its neighbors, flying there to meet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and tour kibbutzim hit by Hamas during the October 7 attacks.
In January, he changed the Iranian flag emoji on Twitter to feature the lion and the sun, a design associated with the dictatorship of the shah. As such, this represented a clear statement of intent to use his platform as a tool to overthrow the current government, as it has been used before under previous ownership.
Twitter has also partnered with AU10TIX, forcing all users who wish to use the site’s premium services to hand over their identities, including their passports and face scans, to the company. AU10TIX is an Israeli company founded and staffed by former spies from elite IDF surveillance group, Unit 8200.
Thus, while many expressed outrage that the platform was not only allowing Terror Alarm to place a bounty on the head of a prominent academic, but was also promoting it as a paid partnership, a closer inspection of Twitter’s close ties to Israeli intelligence makes this revelation much easier to believe.
Marandi himself was far from shocked by the decision to allow the Terror Alarm paid partnership to continue. “Elon Musk and his employees support terrorism, but no one should be surprised. After all, they support the slaughter of women and children across West Asia,” he said.
Alan MacLeod
Alan MacLeod is a member of the Glasgow University Media Group and a Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.
