In a recent pro-Iran propaganda video, a tearful Donald Trump – depicted in Lego form – walks through the rain from a Lego building labelled “Hormuz Strait” to a Lego limousine, where he drinks a Lego Diet Coke and snuggles a young Lego girl with blonde pigtails. The scene is accompanied by a driving bassline under a melody that evokes a schoolyard taunt: “Look in the mirror / tell me what you see / big ego crushed / fake reality.” A taco – referencing the viral “Trump Always Chickens Out” meme – sits in the foreground.
Explosive Media, a production company that counts the Iranian government among its clients, has created dozens of such AI-generated videos since the start of Trump’s war against Iran, garnering millions of views across social media platforms. One video includes a drunk Lego Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, assaulting a Lego woman in a bar. Another shows Lego versions of Trump and Netanyahu conspiring with Satan to bomb a girls’ school.
@explosivemedia.tiktok You played your last card. No more aces. You're DISCARDED. Our latest LEGO-style animation: 𝐋𝐈𝐀𝐑 🎭
They’re crass, they’re childish, and they’re beating Trump at his own game. Iran is winning the information war, and Maga only has itself to thank.
Iran has never been particularly successful in the foreign information warfare department before. A 2020 operation impersonating the far-right Proud Boys and threatening Democratic voters was quickly exposed by US intelligence services. But Explosive Media’s content is not the propaganda of yesteryear; it makes Russia’s copy-pasted attempts to impersonate Americans on social media in 2016 look quaint.
The most discernible advancement, of course, is the company’s use of AI-generated video. The accessibility of high-quality AI tools for creative use has soared since online foreign influence campaigns first began. But it’s the content of the videos which has allowed Iran to achieve the kind of engagement that is probably making Moscow jealous. Unlike Russia – which used bot-powered amplification and targeted ad buys to give the impression of grassroots debate, along with leaked document dumps to drive discourse – Explosive Media has hacked something much more valuable: authentic American popular opinion.
The shitposters that run the company seem to understand social media’s most important maxim: the most engaging content online is the most enraging content. They have seized on a real issue – an unpopular war led by an unpopular president (both have disapproval ratings in the mid-50s) – and created culturally relevant, shocking content that mimics Trump’s own posting style. It’s understandable the videos have performed well; they generate incredulity. A country that bans same-sex relations has seemingly paused its own moral code to describe the sitting president of another country as “Bill Clinton’s BJ Queen.” Better clickbait doesn’t exist.
But it wouldn’t be possible if Trump hadn’t lowered the floor of American political discourse, driving demand for and engagement with such content. It was Trump that posted an AI-generated video of himself flying a plane and spraying untold gallons of excrement on No Kings protesters; Trump that posted AI slopaganda of President Obama being arrested in the Oval Office; Trump and his Maga movement that have prioritized “owning the libs” over making policy. The Trump administration has governed by and for trolls. Now Trump and company are discovering that their tactics are replicable on the increasingly lawless internet they’ve championed, particularly when they resonate with a pissed-off public.
In an era of free speech maximalism that has been encouraged by the Trump administration itself, few social media platforms have taken long-term action against the content. While the videos are AI-generated and riddled with misleading information – they are propaganda, after all – Explosive Media’s employment of Lego-style animation means no one thinks these videos are real-life depictions of events. They’re clearly satire, and the Big Tech platforms have had to grasp for other reasons to ban them. YouTube has suspended Explosive Media for violations of its “violent content” and “Spam, deceptive practices and scams policies.” Instagram has taken action on one of the groups’ accounts, but the rest of its content remains largely accessible on Instagram, X, TikTok, and Telegram, however.
The administration has realised its error. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently sent a cable instructing American diplomats to “counter anti-American propaganda”. Unfortunately, they have to grapple with another reality: Rubio gleefully fired many of the civil servants who had previously been dedicated to that mission, as a result of a rightwing conspiracy theory that they were engaged in “conservative censorship”. One wonders if Iran’s next video might feature a Lego Rubio in an altercation with a leopard, to the tune of the popular song I Never Thought the Leopards Would Eat My Face. (Careful, it’s catchy.)
Rubio was also prescriptive about where diplomats should take their counter-propaganda work. Elon Musk’s X.com, he wrote, is an “innovative” tool that could help the State Department reach its goals. The choice of network belies the administration’s intended audience; Americans remain the single largest national user group represented on the platform. Rubio isn’t instructing his diplomats to message foreign audiences that might be swayed by Iran’s memes. He’s worried that Americans might find themselves bopping – and nodding – along with a foreign adversary’s AI-generated Lego music videos, so he’s instructing America’s diplomats to create propaganda of their own.
“Big ego crushed / fake reality”, indeed.
Nina Jankowicz is an expert on online disinformation and the author of How to Lose the Information War