The New Yorker

Some new yorker brainworms in here so you might want to cover yourself in iodine before you read it:

Last year, a YouTube channel called Akhbar Enfejari (Explosive News) began posting a variety of digital content with a political and moralistic bent. A young Iranian man delivered Middle Eastern news commentary for the camera, influencer-style, ring-lit in front of a neon backdrop. Artificial intelligence-generated animations stressed the importance of decisiveness and offered tips on navigating Iran’s water crisis. The channel and a related Instagram account had a pronounced anti-Western slant—“Send this video to filthy America so it explodes ,” one caption read—but its clips were not particularly galvanizing. Most netted only a few hundred views each. Then, in February of this year, Explosive News hit its stride with a new style of content: A.I.-generated animated propaganda against the U.S.’s war on Iran, done in the style of Lego movies, with world leaders caricatured as yellow bobbleheads and missiles as plastic bricks.

In recent weeks, the Explosive News Lego videos have become inescapable artifacts of an international conflict that was already generating barrages of digital content. The clips have accumulated millions of views and many enthusiastic comments from Western audiences. They have been re-shared by Iranian-government accounts, promoted by Russian state media, and co-opted by No Kings protesters for their flamboyant anti-Trump imagery. The political messaging on display in the videos is as blunt and cartoonish as the blocky Lego characters. Lego Iranians celebrate missiles flying toward Tel Aviv as an A.I.-generated rap soundtrack plays. (The song is “L.O.S.E.R”; “Taste the ash of defeat,” it goes.) A Lego grave reads “R.I.P. Donald John Trump.” A missile-struck White House lights up in flames. The videos express a crude solidarity with victims of U.S. aggression, past and present; in one clip, Lego missiles bear messages in English commemorating everyone from Native Americans to Vietnamese villagers and “stolen blacks.” “ONE VENGEANCE FOR ALL,” text declares in all caps. The videos are also fluent in the language of conspiracy and online trolling. One makes reference to rumors that Benjamin Netanyahu was killed in Iranian strikes and replaced by a deepfake. Another, playing into frenzied online speculation about Trump’s health, depicts a bruise blooming on one of the Lego President’s hands. One clip shows Lego Trump perusing pictures of himself and Netanyahu in the Jeffrey Epstein files, then creating a distraction by launching the missile that struck an Iranian girl’s school last month. The flurry of imagery provokes a surreal sort of whiplash. The subject matter is deathly serious—international war, unfolding in real time, killing thousands—yet the visual vocabulary is preposterously trivializing.

Some news reports have described Explosive News as having ties to the Iranian regime. Forbes, for instance, cited the fact that the Lego videos have been reposted on Telegram by Tasnim News, an outlet affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and the Jerusalem Post noted that certain clips were labelled with an “apparent watermark” for Revayat-e Fath, which is the name of an Iranian state-run media foundation. During an e-mail correspondence this week, a representative of Explosive News claimed that it is “totally independent”—“no government. No military. No state TV.” “Revayat-e Fath,” he said, “is the Persian title of the two videos we released—Victory Chronicles 1 and 2. (In persian: روایت فتح).” When pressed by a fact checker about ties to the regime, he said, coyly, “Is there any way to prove that you are not connected to Jennifer Lawrence?!” He described Explosive News as a “student-led media team with a background in social activism,” and said that the individuals behind it wished to remain anonymous out of fear that their viral success might make them targets in the war campaign. He added, “Funny twist: some of our old universities . . . got bombed. Yep. Quite a ‘gift’ from Donald Trump to Iranian science and culture!”

Explosive News posted its first Lego-style videos during the U.S. and Israel’s bombing campaign on Iranian nuclear facilities last June. When the war began, in February, the representative said, “Our team was ready, plans in place, engines revving—and, by day two, the Lego-style videos were back in action.” They started churning out new clips, writing scripts and then generating corresponding visuals using A.I. and digital editing tools. “Working full time, we can produce a two-minute video in about 24 hours,” the representative said.

American viewers who are accustomed to maga-style trolling might expect the Lego videos to be driven by a certain clickbait nihilism—brain rot, Tehran-style. But the Explosive News representative spoke of their efforts with a lofty earnestness. “Every scene, every frame, every hidden detail, and every idea in our work feel like our own children,” he said. He quoted a Persian proverb (“What comes from the heart will surely sit upon the heart”) and said that the team hopes that their videos can inspire viewers with “a glimpse into a different kind of spirit—something more poetic, more human, maybe a bit more gentle.” Those might not be the first words that come to mind when one watches clips of a Lego Trump whose plastic butt is often on fire. But Explosive News sees itself as fighting “a battle between truth and falsehood.” The spokesperson wrote, “Quick wisdom from the Qur’an: ‘The noblest are those who stay righteous.’ ”

However pure the team’s intentions, the Lego videos have succeeded, in part, because they meet the political discourse on the level to which it has already sunk. The Trump Administration has waged its own meme-based battles on its official social-media accounts with A.S.M.R. videos of deportations, white-nationalist in-jokes, and supercuts of bombings interwoven with video-game footage. Trump is reportedly shown a daily two-minute video montage of successful strikes on Iran to keep him up to date on the war, a kind of private military TikTok feed for a Commander-in-Chief with a toddler’s attention span. Even if Trump himself posts mainly on Truth Social, he is an image-obsessed creature of the internet; it stands to reason that Explosive News’ vengeful, mocking clips may actually reach his eyes, or at least grab public attention by speaking in the same showily combative terms as maga. With the help of A.I., the team can achieve a startling production value. As the representative put it, “We believe that dominant Israeli-American media narratives often present acts of force, injustice, aggression, and even violence in a polished and appealing way through the power of media.” He added, “Let’s face it—if truth isn’t flashy, it’s kinda lonely.”

Last year, a trio of media scholars published a paper titled “Slopaganda,” a new bit of twenty-first-century slang to describe the intersection of generative A.I. and propaganda. The authors argue that this burgeoning form is uniquely toxic, both because it is so quickly and cheaply produced and because it “introduces mass personalisation, creating tailored messages and narratives” in an instant. Slopaganda has quickly become our new Esperanto of international conflict. CCTV, the Chinese state broadcaster, ran an A.I. animation explaining the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz using martial-arts tropes, with the Iranians as anthropomorphized cats and Trump as an eagle-headed grand master unleashing expensive golden bombs. The X account of the Iranian Embassy in the Hague posted an A.I. animation depicting Trump’s internal monologue as an “Inside Out”-esque hive of demons, and the account of the Iranian Embassy in South Africa posted a slop video that referenced a famous covid-era TikTok, of a man longboarding to Fleetwood Mac, to celebrate Iran’s bombing of Tel Aviv. But Explosive News’ videos might be the world’s most potent example of slopaganda yet, changing hearts and minds—or at least generating lots of clicks—one exploding toy battleship at a time.

Last weekend, YouTube and Instagram abruptly took Explosive News’ accounts down. Instagram did not respond to a request for comment, but a spokesperson for YouTube said that it had removed the channel for “violating our Spam, deceptive practices and scams policies.” (The Explosive News representative blamed the ban on “ ‘false flag’ media actions” by “Zionist actors.”) But the videos remain accessible on X and other platforms, and the removals seem to have done little to slow their reach. The representative said that at first the team was surprised by their international notoriety, because they’d aimed their content squarely at Iranian viewers, but that they’ve begun to mold the videos to a wider audience as they “better understand their preferences.” Last week, their channel on Telegram began posting in English instead of in Persian, and the group broadened its name from Explosive News to Explosive Media. This Tuesday, they posted a teaser on X for a new video featuring bombs falling over burning bald eagles and a Lego Moses watching the conflagration of a pyramid etched with Trump’s face. In the current geopolitical climate, perhaps slopaganda is just another path to global-media stardom. “We’re dreaming bigger,” the representative said. “New formats, cinematic vibes, maybe even longer works. Who knows?”