Analysis: These videos, posts and memes reveal much about how wartime propaganda has changed and who has the upper hand when it comes to messaging
In previous wars, propaganda came dressed in the seriousness of the state. Governments issued posters, commissioned films, broadcast speeches and delivered tightly controlled narratives through newspapers, radio and television. It was formal, centralised and unmistakably political. You knew when you were looking at propaganda because it looked like propaganda.
But in the Iran war, some of the most widely shared wartime messaging has looked very different. One of the conflict’s more surreal online trends has been the circulation of AI-generated Lego-style videos depicting US president Donald Trump, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Western leaders as cartoonish caricatures, often set to dramatic music, overlaid with triumphant slogans, and framed within overtly pro-Iran narratives. The New Yorker recently profiled one of the networks behind this phenomenon, describing a pro-Iran media ecosystem producing highly shareable videos designed less like political messaging and more like social media entertainment.
From BBC News, interview with one of the creators of Iran's viral Lego AI videos
Alongside these videos has come a steady stream of sarcastic and meme-like commentary from Iranian diplomatic and state-linked accounts. After Trump's expletive-laden demands that Iran open the Strait of Hormuz, the Iranian embassy in Zimbabwe casually said on X that "we’ve lost the keys". Other Iran-linked accounts circulated jokes, visual gags and sarcastic memes ridiculing the demand. Reporting by Al Jazeera and others noted how these posts quickly escaped diplomatic circles and spread widely across mainstream social platforms, often shared by users with little interest in the underlying politics simply because they found them funny.
All of this can look faintly ridiculous at first glance: toy-themed propaganda; meme diplomacy; sates apparently communicating like teenagers on the internet. But dismissing it as unserious would miss what is actually happening, because these videos and posts reveal something important about how propaganda has changed. Modern wartime propaganda is no longer judged solely by how persuasive, coherent or factually grounded it is. Increasingly, it now has to compete in the attention economy.
From France24, YouTube bands viral pro-Iran AI-generated videos trolling US president Donald Trump
This changes everything. Modern propaganda must survive inside algorithmic feeds where it competes against sport highlights, influencer content, celebrity gossip and whatever else the internet has decided to care about that day. Attention follows very different rules to persuasion. A carefully reasoned official statement may be strategically sound, factually accurate and diplomatically measured, but if nobody watches it, its practical effect is limited. By contrast, a ridiculous AI-generated Lego video may appear unserious. But if it reaches millions of people, shapes emotional perceptions of the conflict, and influences how key actors are framed in the public imagination, it has achieved something strategically valuable.
Iran and its media ecosystem appear to understand this shift well. Much of the content circulating in support of Iran during the conflict resembles entertainment rather than propaganda in the traditional sense. It is fast, visually distinctive, deliberately absurd and native to the platforms on which it spreads. It does not ask audiences to sit down and carefully consider a geopolitical argument. It uses humour, spectacle and ridicule to make political messaging frictionless to consume.
From Reuters, how Lego-style animated videos coming out of Iran from a group called Explosive Media mocking Donald Trump have become the latest flashpoint on social media
This ridicule can be an extraordinarily powerful strategic weapon, with psychologists having long studied related dynamics in status perception. The Pratfall Effect for example, first reveals that visible mistakes can alter perceptions of competence and attractiveness depending on how the individual is already viewed.
More broadly, the research illustrates that competence is shaped by emotional framing and social interpretation. Public ridicule exploits this. It does not need to prove a leader is incompetent; it simply needs to make them feel ridiculous in the eyes of the audience. Strength starts to look like bluster. Confidence becomes arrogance. Threats become tantrums. Serious statements are pre-emptively filtered through the expectation of absurdity.
Iran’s online messaging repeatedly leverages this logic. Trump’s demands are not rebutted point by point, but are mocked. His threats are not carefully dissected and are instead transformed into meme templates. His image is re-rendered into cartoon form and dropped into surreal AI-generated worlds where he is depicted as childish, unstable or foolish (or all three at once). The objective is to change the emotional context in which the argument is received and not to win a policy argument.
A new LEGO AI video was just dropped, entitled "Fake Jesus," mocking Trump in EPIC fashion. pic.twitter.com/IhpkvPe3PG
— Ed Krassenstein (@EdKrassen) April 15, 2026
Crucially, this tactic appears to work, at least in the narrow sense that the content travels. The Lego-style clips spread not because users consciously seek out Iranian propaganda, but because they are visually unusual, absurdly formatted and immediately legible in the grammar of social media. They look like the kind of content people already consume. Their political payload rides piggyback on their entertainment value.
That stands in stark contrast to much official US government messaging. Despite vast communications resources, American state institutions often struggle to produce online content that feels culturally native to the platforms they use. Their attempts at humour frequently come across as over-produced, over-approved and unmistakably institutional. Rather than seeming witty or contemporary, they often land somewhere between awkward and corporate.
This institutional logic has shaped much of the American public message during the current war. The White House has framed events through formal releases proclaiming "clear and unchanging objectives," "decisive success," and "peace through strength". The United States Central Command (CENTCOM) has issued sober operational updates on casualties, safety warnings and mission progress (even though the very name 'Epic Fury' is ripe for memes). Senior officials at the State Department use the familiar language of press remarks and controlled diplomatic explanation.
From CNN, how viral Lego videos show a shift in Iranian propaganda
These are messages designed to reassure allies (in theory), project resolve, document action and maintain narrative discipline. But they also reveal the central problem: bureaucracies are structurally poor at producing authentic internet culture. Institutional messaging typically passes through multiple layers of review, legal scrutiny, strategic alignment and reputational caution. By the time content reaches the public, spontaneity has been stripped away. It may be polished, but it rarely feels alive. Internet humour, by contrast, depends on speed, irreverence, surprise and a willingness to take creative risks that official institutions often cannot tolerate.
States or aligned networks operating through looser, decentralised ecosystems can move faster, mimic trends more naturally, and experiment with formats more aggressively. Highly institutional actors often cannot. They are trying to compete in a communications environment optimised for informality while constrained by the logic of formal institutions.
The result is that some wartime propaganda now behaves more like influencer content than state messaging. Modern propaganda no longer needs to look like propaganda. In fact, the more it resembles ordinary internet culture, the more effective it may become. That is the real lesson of the Iran war’s strangest videos. They are not simply trying to persuade. They are trying to entertain their way into the feed, and in 2026, that may be the most effective form of propaganda there is.
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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
