If you want to understand the future of propaganda, stop reading serious-minded reports about Russia and start watching Iranian Lego diss rap videos, looking at embassy shitposts, and consuming pro-Iran AI slop. A hundred days ago, Iran was a pariah state massacring protesters en masse. Today, it’s the internet’s main character.
That success is made more remarkable by the fact that the White House is playing (and losing) the same game. The Trump administration churns out its own AI slop, its own combative memes, its own shitposts. None of it lands. This kind of propaganda works best when it’s punching up, and you’re not punching up when you’re the one dropping the bombs.
If you want to understand the future of propaganda, stop reading serious-minded reports about Russia and start watching Iranian Lego diss rap videos, looking at embassy shitposts, and consuming pro-Iran AI slop. A hundred days ago, Iran was a pariah state massacring protesters en masse. Today, it’s the internet’s main character.
That success is made more remarkable by the fact that the White House is playing (and losing) the same game. The Trump administration churns out its own AI slop, its own combative memes, its own shitposts. None of it lands. This kind of propaganda works best when it’s punching up, and you’re not punching up when you’re the one dropping the bombs.
The most effective piece of war propaganda of 2026 is a Lego cartoon: On March 10, Iranian state media broadcast a video called “Narrative of Victory,” which soon accomplished a rare feat for state television propaganda: going viral. The AI-generated short video opens with a panicking Lego U.S. President Donald Trump reading through a folder marked “Llrey [sic] Epstein File” (textual nonsense remains a weakness of AI video). Egged on by a cackling Lego Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and literal Satan, Trump launches a missile that hits a girls’ school—represented by a pair of shoes and a lonely backpack among the rubble. A tearful Iranian soldier, cradling the same backpack, launches retaliatory missile strikes.
The dozen-plus Lego videos that followed expanded the format, including some set to trap beats with punchy rap one-liners, and made powerful use of the Minab school strike, where a U.S. missile attack likely killed more than 100 civilians—primarily schoolgirls. It becomes an emotional anchor that turns grief into righteous violence. The Trump-Epstein-Netanyahu-Satan visual cluster gets reinforced across the series; in “Victory Chronicles: Part 2,” Iran’s missiles bear the inscription “In memory of the victims of Epstein Island,” writing U.S. moral corruption onto the instruments of Iranian retribution.
The format—trap beats, swelling cinematic orchestral scoring, Lego animation with a massive existing audience—is effective because it disarms you. Legos tell your brain to play, the music tells your body to feel, and by the time the political payload arrives—Epstein, Satan, dead schoolgirls—you’re already in a mode where critical scrutiny doesn’t activate. It’s the spoonful of sugar that helps the propaganda go down. Even the absurdity of a regime that has executed protesters and arrested teenagers for TikTok dance videos deploying trap-beat Lego rap as state propaganda helps sell it. Irony and absurdity are the internet’s default currency, and Iran is producing content people are ready to buy.
But it’s not just novelty. An Institute for Strategic Dialogue analysis of Iranian diplomatic accounts found that in just 50 days, they garnered nearly a billion views, 14 times that of the prewar period. AI-generated content dominated the top of the charts: An AI video of Jesus slapping Trump into a pit of fire hit 24.1 million views; an AI-generated Trump singing a spoof ballad called “Blockade, Blockade” cleared 8.8 million. The Lego series accumulated millions more across reposts and platforms, with the New Yorker profiling the team behind it.
None of this is resonating because the public has become Khamenei partisans. It’s landing because Iran isn’t manufacturing anti-American sentiment—it’s giving it a format, aimed at a historically, globally unpopular administration. The suspicions about U.S. power and moral rot were already there. As social media scholar Renée DiResta said, it “doesn’t have to change your mind. It just has to win the war for the attention of your target audience.”
Lego videos are just the highest-production example of a broader phenomenon. Across pro-Iran channels and sympathetic creators from Bengaluru to Brooklyn, AI-generated content follows the same logic. None of it pretends to be real. The AI is the aesthetic—and it may be bridging a cultural gap that has traditionally hobbled foreign propaganda. These models are trained predominantly on Western, English-language internet culture, which means an Iranian operator prompting in Farsi gets output that’s already fluent in American meme grammar, slotting seamlessly into AI slop genres millions already scroll through without friction: Fruit Love Island, AI Jesus, Italian brain rot. Propaganda is turned invisible—not because it’s disguised, but because the entire feed it lives in is already synthetic.
Our field is not built for this. We fact-check lies—but this content doesn’t make claims. We find fake accounts—but this spreads through real people. We slap labels on AI content pretending to be authentic—but this isn’t pretending to be anything. Nobody fact-checks a meme. Nobody reverse-image-searches a cartoon. And taking action backfires: What’s the terms-of-service violation? It’s not deceptive. It’s not inciting violence. It’s a Lego cartoon. Take it down and watch Iran’s embassy accounts generate millions of views mocking the United States for feeling threatened by toys. The content is engineered so that any response, including suppression, generates more content. The result is incredibly effective propaganda that our entire toolkit was designed to miss—because it was never asking to be believed. It was asking to be felt.
But AI content is only one front. Shitposting—the art of posting deliberately provocative, absurdist content, usually memes, to drive engagement—has become a legitimate tool of Iranian statecraft. In late March, Trump told reporters the Strait of Hormuz would be “jointly controlled … me and the ayatollah, whoever the next ayatollah is.” Within hours, Iran’s embassy in South Africa posted a photo of a car dashboard with a toy pink-and-blue steering wheel attached next to the real one. Caption: “The Strait of Hormuz will be controlled by me and the Ayatollah 😎😁.” An official diplomatic account of a sovereign nation responded to a U.S. presidential statement with a shitpost. That’s not a social media team going rogue—social media rewards absurdity, confrontation, speed, and irony, and Iran’s diplomats have restructured their entire communication style around that fact.
Iran isn’t the first to try this. Russian embassies flirted with this in the 2010s, as when the Russian Embassy in London posted a Pepe the Frog meme mocking Britain. Chinese wolf warriors—combative diplomats whose provocation ranged from co-opting George Floyd’s last words as a geopolitical clapback to accusing Australia of war crimes—pushed further, generating outrage but little actual persuasion.
Iran’s embassies are making those wolf warriors look like puppies—this isn’t just diplomats trolling, it’s trolling as diplomacy. It helps that there’s a war on—peacetime trolling never had these emotional stakes. It helps that whoever is running these accounts appears to have creative latitude that China’s rigidly centralized messaging apparatus never allowed.
And it helps that the content is actually funny. China ultimately demoted its most prominent wolf warriors after generating backlash without persuasion. Iran faces no such reckoning—the audience is laughing with it, not at it. The White House deploys its own combative social media, of course, but it’s aimed inward. It’s fighting a domestic culture war for an audience that already agrees with it and rarely considers foreign policy. Iran is aimed outward, at a global audience that’s already paying attention because their countries are in the blast radius.
They also benefit from their relative position: When the Russian foreign ministry trolls, it’s a great power flexing—and generally losing the resulting contest to a scrappy Ukrainian response. When Iran’s embassy in Zimbabwe tells Trump “we’ve lost the keys”—mocking Trump’s demand to open the Strait of Hormuz —it’s the class clown shooting a spitball at the principal: The asymmetry is part of the joke.
And the joke is engineered to travel. Each post is designed to break apart, then spread—even the Lego videos’ creators encourage clipping. Screenshots get pulled from context. Posts get stitched together. Formats get hijacked: Iranian military spokesperson Ebrahim Zolfaghari’s mocking signoff, “Thank you for your attention to this matter”—a phrase Trump often uses in his posts on Truth Social—has become a recurring bit across pro-Iran accounts. The image is the meme. The caption is the meme. The reply is the meme. These artifacts fragment on contact with the network and keep traveling without their authors.
And that’s the trap: The best amplifiers are real accounts run by real people sharing things they find genuinely funny, as these memes often are. Whether or not there’s inauthentic coordination is incidental—there are many more people who think U.S. foreign policy is ridiculous; Iranian shitposts speak to that in a familiar format. Our detection apparatus was built to catch fake people doing fake things. Iran is winning by getting real people to do real things, for free.
None of this is about winning a news cycle. It’s about slowly shifting what feels like common sense—who’s worth admiring, who’s worth laughing at—one share at a time. That’s not a war disinformation experts can fight, and frankly, it’s not our job to. Iran out-messaging the United States is a U.S. government problem.
But understanding what’s happening is our job—and right now, we don’t. Much of our industry’s tools were built to expose covert operations, and they’re good at that. But the threat has migrated to overt, memeable propaganda that doesn’t hide its origins, doesn’t make false claims, and doesn’t need fake accounts. We don’t even have the instruments to measure it. We need new tools, new frameworks, and new thinking. But first, we need to admit that you can’t fact-check a vibe—and stop trying.
By the way, @IranInSA, looking forward to your shitpost about this article.
