As part of an overwhelming flow of polished propaganda, Lego-style videos are pouring out of Iran. They’re saturating social media feeds throughout the United States and worldwide with anti-war, pro-Iran messages that cast President Donald Trump as a war criminal who has dragged America into a conflict that it can’t win, on Israel’s behalf.
The stream of near-daily videos has brought the Islamic Republic’s point of view directly onto American computer and phone screens like never before. The viral success reflects a confluence of capabilities for Iran, analysts say: generative artificial intelligence in the hands of young tech wizards; a social media fluency that spreads their pro-Iran content globally; and investment in political, visual storytelling that dates from the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s.
It was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, after all, founder of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, who reassured followers not to worry about their lack of weapons, with the words: “Propaganda is explosive as a grenade.”
Why We Wrote This
Iran’s wartime viral social media campaign has been slick, savvy, and accessible to a Western audience. Despite the White House’s focus on online messaging, Iran seems to have caught the United States completely off guard.
Now, the Iranians have a new story to tell, due to the joint U.S.-Israeli military attack on Iran that began on Feb. 28. And thanks to AI’s capacity to produce sophisticated propaganda videos en masse – “slopaganda” – they can shape popular perceptions of the conflict in a way that appears to far outstrip, in reach and impact, the messaging efforts by the White House and Pentagon, experts say.
“AI is … an economic leveler, because it is just so cheap to make,” says Cayce Myers, a political communications expert at Virginia Tech. “If you’ve got a decent [internet] subscription and a decent system, you can create whatever video content you want.”
An unexpected message
The wave of videos began in late March, when the Iranian Explosive Media production house first added rap music to a short video crammed with messages and symbolism. Called “L.O.S.E.R.,” it proved to be the vanguard of a series that Explosive Media says in total, on all platforms, has racked up 900 million views.
Key themes and insults of the enemy dominate: The Lego-style animation shows President Trump, stressed and sweating at a casino table as he gambles on war against Iran.
Scenes follow of U.S. warships and planes being destroyed, of Iranian missiles being launched, and of Mr. Trump standing overwhelmed among flag-draped soldiers’ caskets. In one sequence, Mr. Trump flips through a mountain of files of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein; in another, he is a puppet manipulated by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“You crossed the ocean just to find your grave / Sacrificed your own boys … for a lie,” plays the rap soundtrack with an American accent. “Sacred defense, we protecting the soil / While you sacrifice soldiers to pay for your spoil!”
The immediate global reaction shocked, as much as anyone, the 10 or so Iranian content creators of Explosive Media, all ages 18 to 25 and committed to Iran’s revolutionary ideals. They watched in awe as their work – and their anti-war, pro-regime messages, so carefully attuned to the current tumult in American politics of the war, and of Mr. Trump – went viral.
“We didn’t expect this kind of feedback from outside the country,” says a video producer at Explosive Media contacted in Iran, who asked not to be further identified. “Americans and Europeans from all over … are reaching out to us, saying they used to think wrong, [that] their view on everything has changed.”
“This is the first time I have seen Iran be able to communicate with a global audience, and particularly an American audience,” says Narges Bajoghli, an Iran expert and cultural anthropologist at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.
“These Lego videos are using American pop culture – the animations, the rap lyrics, the trap beats – it’s all of today’s generation,” says Dr. Bajoghli, who has studied the expansion of cultural production linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps for two decades. “As Americans, it’s hard for us to relate to anyone else’s culture, but if we see that someone has mastered our culture, we are impressed.”
Iranian success, U.S. failure
The videos are not official output of the Islamic Republic, but usually from production houses with some IRGC connection. For years, they have made videos for a domestic audience, or to showcase Iran’s regional “Axis of Resistance” allies, from Lebanon to Yemen, that have long challenged U.S. and Israeli influence.
But the viral spread of the current crop of Lego-style videos even has official Iranian outlets, such as the Islamic Republic News Agency, praising “victory in the soft war.” Most striking, the IRNA reported, is the “speed of production,” which has “filled the vacuum across the social media sphere to introduce a new perception of the war.”
“What’s fascinating is that the U.S. has always been really good at communication during war, and in general,” says Dr. Bajoghli. “U.S. propaganda has consistently been the gold standard. This time around, it’s failing.”
Majid Asgaripour/WANA/Reuters
She cites as one reason the dramatic cuts at the U.S. State Department, by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, which eliminated offices that managed U.S. messaging.
“To have Iran’s media stepping in – in this moment of technological change, and while the Americans are botching any attempt at giving a [coherent] narrative to this war – it’s crazy, because it wasn’t supposed to be like this,” says Dr. Bajoghli.
“The people who are producing these [Iranian] videos are very online,” she says. “They are picking up on all the conversation that is happening here, and they are pushing it, like any smart influence campaign would try to do.”
The capacity of AI to generate images and video has also been used by the White House. In February 2025, for example, Mr. Trump proposed taking over the Gaza Strip and transforming it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
Weeks later, he reposted an AI-generated video depicting an imaginary future “Trump Gaza,” with the real scenes of destruction, caused by months of Israeli airstrikes and building demolition, replaced by a resort with luxury buildings and a towering gold statue of Mr. Trump.
Michał Klincewicz, an assistant professor at the department of computational cognitive science at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, calls that video one of the “first examples of political slopaganda” – a blend of the terms “AI slop” and “propaganda.”
The Trump administration’s AI postings have increased ever since. Besides highlighting the president’s policy priorities, many posts target Mr. Trump’s political enemies – like a video falsely depicting civil rights lawyer Nekima Levy Armstrong crying after being arrested. Another showed the president using a jet fighter to dump excrement on protesters in Chicago.
Near the start of the Iran war, the White House posted a video that mixed footage from real targeted attacks on Iran with clips from well-known movies and other pop culture, labeled “justice the American way.”
Majid Asgaripour/WANA/Reuters
The need for a broader strategy
Mr. Trump is often described as a pioneer in effective use of social media. But in the battle of AI propaganda, experts say, Mr. Trump’s videos lack both quality and strategy.
“The White House efforts with slopaganda have become pretty much behind the curve, compared to what has been achieved by other governments,” says Dr. Klincewicz.
Emerson Brooking, director of strategy at the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council, says videos posted by the U.S. government about the war, which focus on U.S. military might, prove little beyond the fact that the country is “good at bombing things.”
“Propaganda still has to be in service of a broader strategy,” he says.
That’s in contrast with Iranian posts, which Mr. Brooking says tell well-crafted stories that address issues, mock U.S. leaders for fumbling war efforts, and highlight Israel’s role and dwindling support among Americans for the war.
One recent clip from Explosive Media, for example, is called, “Iranians when they realize that the ceasefire is about to expire.”
Just 13 seconds long, it shows Lego-style IRGC soldiers celebrating, polishing their missiles, and preparing drones, as rockets dance on their launchers. It ends with an Iranian commander throwing a missile like a dart that hits Mr. Trump – who wears a headband labeled “LOSER” – as a bull’s-eye target.
Another clip shows hats of historical invaders of Iran floating on the surface of the Persian Gulf, then a rubber duck sinking below the waves, revealing a sunken American aircraft carrier and dead Lego-style U.S. sailors.
It ends with a recent declaration of Iran’s new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei: “The only place in the Persian Gulf for invaders is the bottom of its waters.”
Effects of AI slopaganda
AI slopaganda isn’t meant to change people’s minds, says Mr. Myers, the political comms expert. But the viral content can still subconsciously shape the way people think about the Iran conflict.
“It creates a narrative and a prism by which the individual thinks about the issues,” he says. “It’s not necessarily a one-to-one relationship where, ‘I see this video, therefore I agree with all of its contents.’ It’s more like, ‘I see this video, and therefore I think about these issues through the lens of that video’s perspective.’”
Slopaganda also gets attention, whether it resonates with people or offends them. Mr. Myers says cultural resonance makes it a particularly effective way for savvy users to spread their message across a broad audience.
“One of the things about propaganda is that, in the past, it has come across as very stilted,” he says. “People are able to easily identify it. … This is much more subtle.”
The accessibility of AI, and the low cost of creating videos, means even those with limited resources can reach a wide audience. And there has been no shortage of content during the war, for Iran’s viral videomakers.
“They keep harping on: This isn’t America’s war, this is Israel’s war; that Americans don’t want more wars in the Middle East; that everything is falling apart in the U.S., while people are being sent to die in these wars that nobody wants,” says Dr. Bajoghli.
Explosive Media also counted on the simplicity of Lego characters to “create contrast,” after testing several options, to propel the message that started the trend, says the video producer in Iran.
“Serious subjects presented through a simple, almost playful medium become more accessible – and sometimes more impactful,” he says. “It lowers resistance and invites curiosity.”
Indeed, the effectiveness of the Lego style is highlighted in a music video called “Iran changed the world,” created by a different production house. It describes a “digital content machine” that turned “cartoon Legos into one of the most viral political phenomena of the decade.”
The Lego format “wasn’t accidental,” and was chosen with “deliberate precision, lowering audience defenses before delivering each sharp geopolitical incision.”
“Bricks stack high, but the message cuts deep / Lego figures dancing while the world can’t sleep,” goes the song. “Explosive Media press play and the algorithm spreads / cartoon diplomacy putting real grievances in plastic heads / They didn’t fire missiles, they fired WiFi, from Tehran to your timeline.”
An Iranian researcher contributed to this report.