Iran’s success in spreading these memes has surprised experts who study foreign influence operations. They say the tactics and technology on display during the war will almost certainly be replicated in other international crises, as well as major political events, including the looming elections in the United States.
“It’s spoken to the sort of Gen Z language of the internet in ways certainly diplomats don’t normally do,” said Bret Schafer, a senior director at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an international nonprofit that has tracked Iran’s activity.
“They have taken a regime that is, I mean, brutal and pretty awful and didn’t have exactly a great global reputation and turned them into kind of a plucky, fun underdog.”
Dozens of accounts belonging to Iranian government officials and diplomats have peppered their social feeds with a previously uncharacteristic edge, reposting biting videos that mock the United States and Israel.
They portray Mr. Trump as an imperialist out for blood or as an incompetent lackey of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, often stoking antisemitic tropes. They regularly suggest the war was launched to distract from the disclosures in the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Collectively, the posts by roughly 150 official Iranian accounts gained about 900 million views over the first 50 days of the war, a thirtyfold increase from the same period before, according to an analysis published on Thursday by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
“They’re talking in a way that’s fundamentally changed,” said Moustafa Ayad, another researcher at the institute. “If you go back two months and look at what they were putting out, it’s nothing like this.”
Propaganda is always adapting, reflecting the era in which it is made. Iran’s deft use of technology, experts say, has highlighted a new era of meme warfare that expands the information battlefield by using the algorithmic engines of social media to undermine an adversary’s political support. The new tactic has been called “slopaganda.”
Iran’s effort, the institute’s analysis concluded, “offers a blueprint that authoritarian actors can replicate in the future.”
The Meme War
The number of posts from Iranian Consulate accounts that included memes, jokes or A.I.-generated content skewering the United States or Israel has risen sharply in recent weeks as the online meme war intensified.
Of all memes posted by the Iranians, none have resonated as much as a series of videos featuring Legos. A small team of content creators in Iran has turned the globally recognized toy, which has its own movie franchise, into one of the most potent weapons in the meme arsenal.
In the videos, a character resembling Mr. Trump sweats or cowers. Iranian soldiers and civilians, by contrast, are cast as resolute in the face of the combined military might of the United States and Israel.
The people behind them call themselves Explosive Media — or, as they put it in their biography on TikTok, simply the “Iranian Lego team.” They have used artificial intelligence tools to generate short videos with the toy figurines manipulated to resemble Mr. Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Satan, an Iranian epithet for the United States for decades now.
They have posted mostly on YouTube, but they also have accounts on Instagram, X, Telegram and, since last week, Facebook. They have inspired a virtual army of imitators.
The group was founded during the 12-day war between Israel and Iran last year. They call the series of videos “Victory Chronicles,” which in Persian shares a name with the Revayat-e Fath Institute, a cultural center in Tehran sponsored by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
That has led some news accounts to link them to the government, but a representative, reached through Facebook, said the team, with fewer than 10 members, operated independently. They have sold the broadcasting rights in Iran, including to state news agencies, the representative said.
A spokesman for Iran’s mission at the United Nations declined to comment about the country’s messaging online.
Explosive Media
A.I.-generated videos from Explosive Media, an Iranian group, depict world leaders as Lego characters.
Pay attention to the sermons Pete Fiction
@PeteHegseth
Views 331.1k
The veil is thinning.
Good. Evil.
Time is running out.
Choose your side.
RISE UP!
Views 397.6k
In the United States, the videos have tapped into opposition from the war’s critics on the left, but also on the right.
Renee DiResta, an associate research professor at Georgetown University who has long studied digital influence operations, attributed the widespread popularity of the Lego videos to the creators’ “incredible cultural fluency.”
They use rap songs. They refer to familiar tropes, like Mr. Trump’s love of Diet Coke or criticism of Mr. Hegseth’s drinking habits. And they are extremely topical, responding to events as they happen, as recently as Mr. Vance’s postponed trip to Pakistan for peace talks on Tuesday.
Today’s rapidly evolving technology has enabled them to create longer, scripted animations. They transform the horror of war into the realm of child’s play, depicting the violence in a sanitized way that does not necessarily repel potential viewers in the space where most are watching: social media.
“They managed to hit on all of the identity-culture aesthetics that the internet is really there for,” Ms. DiResta said. “It’s kind of immediately graspable.”
The Lego Group, based in Denmark, did not respond to a request for comment about the use of its product in wartime propaganda.
The White House also declined to respond to specific questions about Iran’s propaganda, including the president’s response to the mocking Lego memes and whether the administration had taken any steps to respond. A spokeswoman, Anna Kelly, instead questioned in an email why anyone would call “terrorist regime propaganda” effective.
The Trump administration arguably started the meme war.
It has long shown a penchant of turning political issues into memes that it spreads on official and unofficial accounts. Since the first strikes on Feb. 28, a team in the White House has posted numerous videos using images generated by A.I. or spliced with clips from action movies and video games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto.
After a slow start when the war began, Iran responded in kind. Many of its memes have been produced in Iran, including the Lego videos, though not all, according to the researchers who have tracked them.
The videos are obviously animations, not deepfakes of attacks that can be debunked and thus defused, as false reports of downing jets and sinking aircraft carriers have been.
Iran’s spread of memes has largely not been restricted on social media, despite the platforms’ policies against inauthentic amplification and deceptive or excessively violent images.
X, owned by Elon Musk, has been one of the biggest outlets for Iranian propaganda, much of it spread by the country’s government agencies and diplomatic outposts around the world that have paid for X’s blue check for paid users. X did not respond to a request for comment.
Explosive Media’s accounts on Instagram and YouTube were taken down in March, though the one on Instagram was restored because it did not violate the platform’s policies, according to Meta, Instagram’s parent company. YouTube said in a statement that the account there had violated rules against deceptive practices, which apply to coordinated foreign influence campaigns.
In a measure of the campaign’s perceived value to the Iranian government, a spokesman for its Foreign Ministry, Esmaeil Baqaei, posted a rebuke on X. He called YouTube’s ban an effort to “shield the American administration’s false narrative from any competing voice.”
The popularity of the Lego videos has inspired efforts to fight fire with fire.
Charlie Curran, a 35-year-old filmmaker in Hollywood, was distressed by the shooting down of an F-15E jet in Iran, which prompted a frantic American search for the two surviving crew members. In response, he made a video in the Iranian style, depicting the rescue of one of them.
“I saw this all taking place and happening,” he said in an interview, referring to Iran’s memes, “and I was like, how is there no American response to this?”
Fighting Back
Charlie Curran, an American filmmaker, created his own response to Iranian videos featuring Lego characters.
Rescuing American Pilot in Iran (2026, colorized)
Views 804.4k
Mr. Curran said he had embraced the potential of A.I. in filmmaking. He used Anthropic’s Claude to write a script and Seedance 2.0, the video generator from China’s ByteDance, which drew international attention recently for generating a simulation of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt brawling on a roof.
It took 30 minutes, he said, to make his 72-second video. Since he posted it on X on April 7, it has been seen more than 800,000 times. It has also been shared across other platforms, with and without credit, and seen by millions more.
“It’s not inherently difficult,” Mr. Curran said, “which is why I think you’ll see a lot more of this.”
