The videos keep coming. Lego-fied caricatures of Trump and Netanyahu. Gangster rap soundtracking White House mockery. An 80s French pop ballad reborn as a Strait of Hormuz taunt. They rack up millions of views on X, get shared by people who wouldn’t know a Revolutionary Guard from a road sign, and land with the casual virality of a celebrity beef. Behind them: a government that imprisons journalists, executes dissidents, and beats women for the crime of uncovered hair.
So how is the Islamic Republic running laps around Washington in the one arena that increasingly shapes global perception?
Because meme wars don’t run on moral authority. They run on entirely different rules.
The playing field was never fair to begin with
The viral attention economy — X, TikTok, Instagram Reels — rewards one thing above all else: content that combines something familiar with something jarring enough to make you stop scrolling. Authority doesn’t travel. Grievance does. Underdogs do. Humiliation of the powerful does. Iran didn’t write those rules. Donald Trump’s own political operation helped pioneer them. Iran just read the manual.
The operator hiding in plain sight
The engine behind much of this content is an account called Explosive Media — self-described as an “Iranian Lego-style animation team. Fast. Instant. Explosive.” For months it claimed total independence. Then the BBC got one of its representatives on a video call. After some pressure, he admitted the Iranian government is a “customer.” He appeared silhouetted, flanked by the colors of the Iranian flag, a green-feathered helmet associated with the Shia martyr Husayn ibn Ali visible on his desk.
The arm’s-length structure is deliberate. It gives the content just enough deniability to survive platform moderation while delivering state-directed messaging to English-speaking global audiences.
Why Lego specifically
The Lego aesthetic is a genuine stroke of strategic genius. It makes content about dead children and downed aircraft shareable to audiences who would never engage with conventional atrocity footage. The visual language of a children’s toy creates cognitive dissonance — the brain processes it as playful, then gets ambushed by the content inside. One video shows tiny shoes and a plastic backpack near rubble, evoking a bombed girls’ school. You don’t look away. You share it.
They’re not selling Iran. They’re selling your own doubts back to you.
This is the part that should make American strategists genuinely uncomfortable. The most effective Iranian videos don’t argue for the Iranian government. They activate pre-existing American fracture lines. Trump falling through a whirlwind of Epstein documents. George Floyd under a policeman’s boot, as narration explains that Iran is standing up for “everyone your system ever wronged.” These videos are precision-targeted at the audiences most likely to amplify them — the American left, the global anti-interventionist bloc, anyone who already distrusts Washington. Iran is not trying to convince you the Islamic Republic is good. It’s trying to convince you America is worse.
The US response makes things worse
The White House has been playing this game too — splicing Call of Duty footage with real airstrikes, dropping Mortal Kombat sound effects over combat video, borrowing from Braveheart and Top Gun. The problem is structural: America’s version reads as triumphalism. Dominance aesthetics play well to your domestic base and terribly everywhere else. For global audiences — especially across the Global South, where distrust of American power runs deep and durable — it confirms exactly the narrative Iran is selling: a superpower that treats war as entertainment and its enemies as NPCs.
Speed as a signal
Explosive Media published a video about a ceasefire agreement before any official announcement. That’s not an accident — it’s a demonstration. The message embedded in the speed itself is: we are faster than your reality, we set the frame before you can respond. Across the arc of this conflict, AI-generated Iranian propaganda has accumulated an estimated hundreds of millions of views. That is not a rounding error. That is an information environment being shaped in real time.
The structural problem America can’t easily solve
Counter-propaganda from a position of undisputed military dominance is inherently hard. You can’t credibly play the underdog when you’re the country launching the airstrikes. The powerful can only win the narrative war if their domestic audience is the only audience that matters — and on global platforms, it isn’t. Every Lego video that lands in Lagos or Jakarta or São Paulo is doing damage that an F-35 flyover cannot repair.
None of this makes the Iranian regime’s content truthful. The videos are riddled with fabrications — a downed US pilot Iran claimed to have captured was in fact rescued by American special forces and is receiving treatment in Kuwait. Mr. Explosive, when confronted with this, said: “Possibly there was no lost pilot. Their main goal was to steal uranium from Iran.” The propaganda is shameless. It doesn’t need to be accurate. It only needs to be more compelling than whatever is competing for attention in the same feed.
That, in the end, is the uncomfortable lesson. In an attention economy, the most disciplined liar with the best aesthetic and the most resonant villain wins the scroll — at least until the next cycle. America helped build that economy. It’s now discovering that no one is immune to it.