How Iran out-shitposted the White House

In the early days of the war on Iran, while the White House was busy posting Call of Duty memes and AI slop of dancing bowling pins, the Iranian regime’s state media was flooding the zone with video after video of what was happening on the ground: Explosions over Tehran. Smoke billowing in the sky. Blood on the ground. A Tomahawk missile landing on a school. Grieving parents burying their children.

How Iran out-shitposted the White House

The truth favored the Iranian regime. Rather than pivot from its playbook of fog and disinformation, it chose AI slop instead.

Only weeks prior, the authoritarian regime had been struggling to shut down all footage of the protests convulsing the nation, cutting off internet access to the outside world in the longest blackout in Iranian history. When Iranian dissidents managed to circumvent the blackout to post photos and videos of what was happening, the regime decried these images as Zionist AI slop, even as it admitted to killing thousands of protesters.

Then, on February 28th, the United States and Israel launched a surprise attack on Iran, killing thousands, including civilians. Now the shoe was on the other foot: As the victims of an illegal war, reality was now the best possible propaganda for the Iranian regime, and Iranian state media found itself hard at work trying to tell the truth, disseminating high-definition videos of American-wrought carnage.

Prior to the attacks, it looked as though some connectivity was returning to Iran, but as bombs fell, the blackout was once again in place. However, there were some early suggestions that Iran was going to selectively lift the blackout “for those who can carry our voice further” — a kind of tiered internet access for whitelisted people willing to promote, at the very least, an anti-war message. No one could have foreseen what would happen next.

By mid-March, the most dominant strain of Iranian propaganda was of a markedly different tone. Little Lego minifigures dressed up as soldiers as Lego planes and Lego helicopters burn in an AI-generated desert. Videos crammed in references to Jeffrey Epstein and dead Iranian schoolgirls alongside guns and explosions. It turned out that Lego AI slop was the voice that would carry the farthest.

The two great conflicts of this decade up until this point have been in Ukraine and Gaza, and both were accompanied by an onslaught of authentic documentation of missile strikes, shelled-out buildings, and dead bodies. An uncanny amount of this footage came from civilians turned into unwilling war correspondents. For a brief moment in time, the Iran war looked like it might follow a similar pattern, as a missile strike on a school in Minab killed 175 people, including schoolchildren. Photos of the destroyed school and aerial footage of graves being dug for the children became emblematic of the unjustness of the war. But even as these images spread, the internet blackout remained in place. Although Minab continues to be a rallying cry for Iranian state media, its outward-facing propaganda strategy started to look a lot like they were just trying to out-shitpost the American government.

Iran lacked America’s military resources, but it had other cards to play. Its stranglehold over the Strait of Hormuz turned into a crisis that might permanently reshape the global economy. As gas prices soared, Donald Trump spiraled, issuing an apocalyptic ultimatum on Truth Social demanding that Iran open the Strait lest America consign them to “living in hell.” Days later, the nations reached a conditional ceasefire deal — one where Iran’s demands are the starting point for negotiations. The regime’s posting game seemed to live rent-free in Trump’s head, with the president posting on Truth Social on Friday morning, “The Iranians are better at handling the Fake News Media, and ‘Public Relations,’ than they are at fighting!”

The story of the ceasefire is the story of the MAGA’s insular, far-too-online bubble crashing and burning against the formidable force that is ocean geography. It would be far too much to say that Iran shitposted its way into a favorable ceasefire. But the Lego AI slop didn’t *not *work.

Lego AI slop propaganda from what may or may not be Iranian state media: This is a surreal sequence of words that should never have been written. A representative of Explosive Media — the team behind the Lego videos — told The New Yorker that it wasn’t affiliated with the regime, arguing, “Is there any way to prove that you are not connected to Jennifer Lawrence?!”

The group also told The Associated Press that it was producing from inside Iran, though it claimed, “We’re just a group of friends working voluntarily — paying for our own internet, using our own laptops and computers, and doing all of this ourselves.” If it’s true that they are inside Iran’s borders, it’s highly likely that they have whitelisted internet access. Without being sanctioned by the regime, it would be difficult to have enough connectivity to upload these videos, and almost impossible to manufacture them in the first place.

“Over the past 15 years, Khamenei made sure sufficient money, talent, and institutional priority flowed toward digital content creation,” Narges Bajoghli writes in New York. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps “operates or funds at least 50 production houses,” and the most significant ones in this moment are the little ones, “small, fast, and built for the internet, made by a new generation coming to power in Iran as American-Israeli bombs kill off the elder leaders — one that is younger, savvier, and less afraid of the US.”

“These freelance studios,” Bajoghli writes, “are not ‘official’ IRGC channels but rather produce media for the broader media arms of the state, and they receive funding from both the IRGC and other coffers of the state and military establishments.”

Sourced at one of these smaller production houses, Bajoghli describes how the new generation was already waiting in the wings, ready to make content. They had long since been proficient in making “videos with faster cuts and a sense of irreverence,” but the IRGC had previously dismissed the videos as not being “serious enough.” The war became their opportunity to shine.

Whether or not Explosive Media is one of these state-sponsored studios, state accounts — like those belonging to Iranian embassies around the world — were nevertheless reposting its Lego videos. And it wasn’t just the Lego videos that formed the great Slop Wave coming from Iranian state accounts.

“American soldiers, you’re fighting for JEFFREY EPSTEIN,” posted the Iranian embassy in Tunis, over a clipshow of deepfaked American soldiers. The Iranian embassy in The Hague mocked Trump with Pixar-esque AI slop of the president; the Iranian embassy in South Africa reheated a stale TikTok meme from 2020 to depict an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officer — seemingly IRGC spokesperson Ebrahim Zolfaghari, who makes regular appearances in state media.

Those who stared too long into the Lego abyss came out sounding completely deranged. “Iran Is Winning the AI Slop Propaganda War,” 404 Media declared glumly. But what war was that, exactly?

While the White House was posting SpongeBob SquarePants memes for its own base, the Lego slop obviously isn’t intended for Iranians in Iran, says Afsaneh Rigot, a scholar and researcher who has worked on human rights issues in the Middle East and North Africa for many years. The internet blackout is still ongoing. Although Iranians are still able to secure tiny pockets of access here and there between VPNs, “they’re not going to be wasting their tiny bit of access trying to load something like” a Lego slop video.