Media coverage attributed the videos, some of which were broadcast on Iranian state television in addition to spreading online, to the Revayat-e Fath Institute. The name translates to “The Narration of Victory"; coverage linked the content to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has been implicated in other influence operations and hacking campaigns. However, most of the viral videos bear the logo of the “Explosive News Team,” a self-described grassroots group who have claimed credit on X for being “that Iranian Lego animation guys.” On the afternoon of March 28, they complained that their YouTube and Instagram accounts had been taken down. In email correspondence with The New Yorker, they claim to be student-run and totally independent; Revayat-e Fath, they say, is the Persian title of their videos.
Generative AI has made it cheap and easy to produce polished propaganda at scale, and just as easy to blur the line between official messaging and opportunistic imitation. Packaging war in the visual language of entertainment makes conflict propaganda more likely to spread, regardless of who made it. Social media is an open playing field: any government, proxy group, or anonymous account can compete for the same audience, and because users are active participants, the most compelling content wins the most reach regardless of its origin or intent.
Videos seen on the White House X account depicting different video games cut with war footage. —The White House/X
Other videos shared by the White House spliced scenes from Call of Duty with real airstrike footage, clips from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Braveheart, and audio nods to Top Gun and Mortal Kombat. The Iranian videos tell stories of horror and of Trump’s humiliation; the White House clips project dominance and military might. But both package war in the familiar language of entertainment.
The underlying logic works like this: borrow the visual language of games, memes, and children’s toys; place them in contexts jarring enough to capture attention; and let engaged audiences do the rest. Social media users don’t need to endorse a message to spread it. They only need to find it compelling enough to watch and share.
The template was arguably set in 2015, when the Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist group released No Respite, a four-minute English language recruitment video that premiered about a week after the Bataclan attacks in Paris. Every frame was built to look like something a Western teenager steeped in gaming culture would find appealing: tight cuts, pacing straight out of an action-movie trailer. It was made both to mock the coalition forces and to make ISIS feel like an aspirational brand. Platforms played whack-a-mole as “swarms” of intrigued users shared it. Researchers began to speculate about the future of memetic warfare.
There were glaring strategic omissions in the video: Chinese doctor Legos warning the Statue of Liberty that the virus was bad seemed brazenly ironic to those of us who followed China’s aggressive policing of doctors as the pathogen began to spread. But the format wrapped a simple message—“the U.S. is failing”—in a mockingly funny, childlike aesthetic that made it easy to watch, and frictionless to share.
Russia picked up the LEGO aesthetic as well. Ahead of Moldova’s 2025 parliamentary elections, Russian propagandists circulated images of fabricated LEGO sets depicting soldiers with Ukrainian and Moldovan flags, designed to stoke fears that Moldova would be dragged into the war if it supported certain parties. The plastic brick, it turns out, is remarkably versatile as an instrument of statecraft.
The currency of social media is not authority or accuracy, it is engagement. The content that travels fastest combines familiarity with novelty: a trope people instantly recognize, deployed in a setting jarring enough to make them react. That is why propaganda now so often arrives as a meme, parody, or spectacle. Users do not have to agree with it to help distribute it. They only have to engage with it.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt bragged that the White House's videos had generated more than 2 billion impressions. Some analyst commentary argued that Iran’s LEGO videos had outpaced Trump’s. Regardless of who is winning the virality contest, both figures dwarf the reach of any individual news report about the actual events in question. Stories of a bombed school, military casualties, and burning oil fields are processed through memes. Increasingly, people encounter war first as content, and only later, if at all, as news.
State-run accounts can generate an endless stream of Lego animation, or even deepfaked battle footage, for as long as audiences appear interested in engaging with it. Copycat accounts—some state-linked, others simply chasing revenue or clout—can flood the zone with variants. That blurs attribution and complicates moderation, forcing platforms to make difficult and increasingly opaque judgments about accounts like Explosive News. What counts as state propaganda, what counts as coordinated manipulation, and what remains in bounds?
But that is too narrow a measure of success. The deeper effect is environmental. Viral propaganda creates the atmosphere through which a conflict is perceived: it shapes what feels salient, what seems ridiculous, who seems triumphant, what feels righteous.
The White House videos aren’t trying to convert opponents; they’re performing dominance for an audience that already supports the war (even as more than half of the American public does not). But when the meme becomes the primary text and the news itself remains in the background, the spectacle doesn’t have to change your mind. It just has to win the war for the attention of your target audience.
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