The war on Iran is the first major conflict where the propaganda battle might be won or lost in memes.
Pro-Iran accounts have unleashed viral videos in recent days mocking President Trump, casting him as a dupe of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and suggesting U.S. forces could suffer major losses if the conflict continues.
The videos make use of AI technology and sophisticated animation, holding Trump and his allies up to ridicule and sometimes presenting the protagonists in the war as Lego-style characters.
(The official Lego brand obviously has no connection with the videos in question.)
The videos are plainly designed not only to show Iranian defiance but to foment dissent against Trump's war among Americans. They function almost entirely on a visual level, removing any real language barrier, and the spare text is more often in English than in Farsi. Some videos also make reference to potent topics in American political culture, such as the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
The pro-Iranian messages are a counterweight, of a kind, to the videos the Trump administration has released to underscore its military successes in the conflict that began on Feb. 28.
The U.S. videos have been accompanied by loud music and spliced with clips from franchises including "Call of Duty" and "Top Gun." In one instance, cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants even popped up saying, "You want to see me do it again?" amid footage of U.S. strikes on Iran.
The American videos have been controversial, with critics complaining about a trivialization or gamification of war and bloodshed. The administration has defended the approach. In one quote that itself went semi-viral on social media, an unnamed senior White House official proudly told Politico, "We're over here just grinding away on banger memes, dude."
Experts on propaganda and the use of social media in the modern age say that the new developments are hugely significant -- even as they are careful not to equate the so-called meme war with an actual war that has killed almost 2,000 people in Iran, roiled the global economy and cost the lives of at least 13 American service members.
Roger Stahl, a professor of communication studies at the University of Georgia, said he didn't want to "diminish the fact that there is a real, kinetic war" taking place.
But he acknowledged that the nature of social media can make it easier for a side that is militarily outgunned to get its message out at near-parity with its larger adversaries.
"The platform itself and the viral nature of things favors asymmetric, low-power actors because they can produce something that will go viral if it's clever enough," Stahl said.
Contrasting the current, often chaotic, information environment with the old model where American media was defined by a handful of newspapers and three broadcast networks, Stahl added that now "it's not about having monopoly power over a few channels; it's about open season on an open field. Just as Iran has thousands of tiny drones, it can play the social game in a similar way."
The provenance of every single pro-Iranian video is not clear.
Two of the major AI animations appear to come from an account known as Explosive Media on social platform X and Akhbarenfejari on Instagram. The X account described the people behind it as an "independent Iranian AI production team" in a March 18 post.
But the Iranian leadership itself has also made use of social media -- and its puckish sensibility.
The Speaker of the Iranian Parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, trolled U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth with a Thursday post implying Hegseth was being a crybaby for complaining that Iran had "lied" about its missile capabilities.
The Iranian Embassy in South Africa shared its own AI-generated video early Friday celebrating missile attacks against Tel Aviv. And, earlier in the week, a spokesperson for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps made a video statement in which he switched from Farsi to English to mock Trump with the trademark phrases "You're fired" and "Thank you for your attention to this matter."
To be sure, the Iranian regime is equally open to the charge of trivializing the conflict, and the enthusiasm expressed online for the videos by Trump-critical Americans sits uneasily with the Islamic Republic's grim human rights record. A regime crackdown on domestic protesters earlier this year is estimated to have killed more than 7,000 people.
But it's possible to acknowledge those facts and still see why people are fascinated by the very modern way in which the propaganda battle is playing out.
The sheer speed of communication in the social media age can mean that "traditional newspapers are sometimes covering what the rest of the world understands is already going on in social media," said Renee Hobbs, a communications studies professor at the University of Rhode Island.
Hobbs, an expert on modern media literacy, also noted that the Iranian efforts to make Trump a figure of ridicule have a particular potency given the president’s fixation with being viewed as a strong leader.
“I think now, in his second term, people around the world are understanding how to get under his skin, and what are the triggers,” Hobbs said.
She added that Trump’s adversaries, including the Iranians, “make the decision to fight fire with fire. ‘If Trump is going to use internet memes to show how strong he is, we are going to use the same strategies to show how weak he is.’”
Similarly, Stahl noted that one reason that the pro-Iranian animated videos have such traction is because they have an actual narrative structure as opposed to the “highlight reel” sensibility of the Trump administration’s videos of missile strikes.
The U.S. videos “don’t tell a story. They aren’t designed to make a case. The ones coming out of Iran, like the AI ‘Lego’ one, ascribe a motive to the Trump administration -- distraction from the Epstein files -- and describe the overreach of the campaign,” he said.
Ultimately the propaganda battle will never be quite so important as the military and diplomatic ones. But it is being waged with ferocity all the same.
“It’s the TikTok age, and governments are driving their propaganda and their messages in that type of format,” said Tobe Berkovitz, a Boston University professor emeritus who specializes in political communication.