Iran's Lego-Style AI Propaganda Videos Are Far More Sophisticated Than Experts Expected

The videos arrived on social media within weeks of the US-Israel strikes on Iran, and they looked nothing like conventional wartime propaganda. Animated in the style of The Lego Movie, they featured blocky figurines of Donald Trump tumbling into a bullseye built from Epstein files, Pete Hegseth rendered in plastic yellow, and an Iranian man grilling four US aircraft like kebabs over a campfire. Each clip ran roughly two minutes. Each was produced in approximately 24 hours.

The group behind them calls itself Akhbar Enfejari, Arabic and Farsi for "Explosive News," though it also operates under the names Explosive News Team and Explosive Media. On X, the group describes itself as an "Iranian Lego-style animation team" and has even established a Spotify page for its music tracks. In email correspondence, a representative who declined to be identified for safety reasons told The New Yorker that some of their universities had been bombed in US strikes, calling it "quite a 'gift' from Donald Trump to Iranian science and culture." Via Telegram, the group told the Associated Press: "We don't even receive any funding. 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."

Analysts are broadly unconvinced. One expert pointed to the fundamental contradiction embedded in the independence claim: X has been blocked inside Iran for years, accessible only via VPN, and the country's internet has been severely restricted since a government crackdown on nationwide protests. Uploading bandwidth-heavy AI video from within Iran means, this expert argued, the group is "officially or unofficially cooperating with the regime." Iranian state media outlet Tasnim and Russian broadcaster RT have both amplified the content. A separate group, Revayat-e Fath ("The Narration of Victory"), has been explicitly linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and is producing similar material within the same propaganda ecosystem.

The scale of reach has stunned researchers. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that roughly two dozen blue-check X accounts posting AI-generated pro-Iran content collectively accumulated more than 1 billion views since the conflict began on February 28. The English-language framing appears deliberately calibrated for non-Iranian audiences, a calculation that proved correct in one unexpected way: US "No Kings" protesters reshared the videos widely, extending their domestic American reach well beyond anything Iran's traditional media apparatus could have achieved.

YouTube suspended the Explosive News account on March 28, citing violations of its "Spam, deceptive practices and scams policies." Instagram removed it the same day without comment. Analysts say the bans may have backfired, making the content more popular rather than suppressing it. Shortly after the US-Iran ceasefire on April 10-11, Explosive Media released a new video lampooning Trump and declaring "Iran won." Lego and Warner Bros., whose Lego Movie aesthetic the group has appropriated wholesale, have not responded to requests for comment on copyright and likeness concerns.

Joseph Bodnar, senior research manager at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, described the operation as structurally new: "Iran has crafted a wartime propaganda strategy tailored for the age of AI slop and algorithmic amplification. They are playing to the AI aesthetics and hyperbolic anti-imperialist narratives that draw attention, spark controversy and get rewarded by platforms." Propaganda scholar Nancy Snow, author of more than a dozen books on the subject, framed the strategy more bluntly: "They're using popular culture against the number one pop culture country, the United States."

Disinformation researcher Melanie Smith called this conflict the first time AI has been used so "intentionally to sow chaos and confusion" about real-time events. The portmanteau "slopaganda," coined in a paper published in Filosofiska Notiser in late 2025, may already be insufficient to describe what's happening. Iran is not operating in isolation: China's CCTV produced AI videos depicting Americans as birds, and the White House posted footage mixing real strike imagery with clips from movies, TV series, video games, and anime. The infrastructure for AI-accelerated narrative warfare, it turns out, belongs to no single government.