A Lego-esque Iranian military commander raps over a gangster beat: “Our inboxes are full of Americans who say they don’t watch the news. They listen to our songs instead because the media is full of crap.”
This is the beginning of an AI-generated video that is part of an Iranian meme campaign. Built around Lego-style animation and a rap soundtrack, it has amassed billions of plays online. This sentence captures the strange reality of modern politics. News is often most effectively spread through humor, memes, and entertainment, not through journalism.
Since late February, pro-Iranian media groups, particularly the X account Explosive Media, have flooded social media with AI-generated video content mocking Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, and U.S. foreign policy. Although it is called “Slopaganda”, its sophistication is impressive.
Read more: Slopeganda war: How (and why) the US and Iran are flooding the region with AI-generated viral noise
Although these videos contain disinformation and anti-Semitic tropes, they do not look or feel like state propaganda. This is despite an Explosive Media spokesperson confirming to the BBC that the Iranian government is a client. They capture the internet zeitgeist: they’re fast, funny, visually friendly, and designed for virality.
trojan horse
The success of these memes lies in their audience strategy. It is not targeted at people who are actively seeking news. Instead, they imitate the language of everyday internet culture to reach people who have no interest in Middle Eastern events.
Humor is the mechanism they use to gain reach. These videos function like Trojan horses, telling stories about American excess, dysfunction, and corruption while drawing viewers in with recognizable images, references, and music.
Emerson Brooking, a US-based disinformation expert, said this type of content reaches “people who are politically apathetic and would not otherwise engage with war-related content.”
The key insight here is not geopolitics but audience. Traditional political communications such as press conferences, policy statements, and traditional news reporting reach people who are already paying attention. These AI meme videos are designed to reach everyone else, the millions of people whose understanding of international conflicts doesn’t extend beyond what happens to appear on their social media feeds.
Humor is the main mechanism these videos utilized to conquer social media algorithms. A joke is a delivery system, not a message. By packaging geopolitical arguments within “diss tracks,” pop culture references, and shareable clips, these videos convey political ideas before viewers even realize they’re consuming political content.
What makes viewers accept “Slopaganda”?
But this raises deeper questions. Why are people so happy to receive political information in this way? The answer is that they are ready for it.
For two decades, a generation of Americans, and increasingly British and European viewers, have learned to process political news through satire. Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show became a more reliable source of political information for many young viewers than the nightly news.
Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Seth Meyers, and Jimmy Kimmel have also found huge audiences by making politics funny, relatable, and emotional in a way that traditional journalism often cannot. The implicit message, repeated nightly, was that humor was not just about expressing political commentary. It has become more straightforward.
Department of Defense News/Flickr/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
This was primarily a progressive phenomenon. The targets were government and private politicians and large institutions, and the satirists positioned themselves as holding the power to be accountable. However, this has created an expectation that political content should be funny and that comedy is a legitimate means of understanding politics.
Iran is copying a populist strategy
Since 2008, many populists have recognized the power of using humor in election campaigns, and none more so than Trump. His campaign appearances on comedy podcasts, garbage truck and McDonald’s drive-through stunts, and endless memes are not distractions from his political strategy; they are his political strategy.
Trump appealed to and mobilized millions of disaffected and typically apathetic voters who had long stopped engaging with political news in traditional ways.
Iran is also paying attention. American propaganda scholar Nancy Snow has pointed out that Iran is currently “using popular culture against the United States, which is the number one pop culture country.”
The Lego aesthetic, rap beats, 1980s pop covers, and choice of jokes aren’t random choices. These represent the precise alignment of what can effectively reach online audiences in the Western attention economy.
The result is content that doesn’t immediately look like foreign propaganda, but instead looks more like entertainment. For viewers who are already used to learning about politics through comedy, the difference is hardly noticeable.
There is a deep irony here. The cultural conditions that gave rise to shows like “The Daily Show” and “Last Week Tonight”—a declining trust in mainstream political communication, a demand for authenticity and humor over formal rhetoric—created a media environment in which foreign countries could deliver propaganda to millions of Americans that felt indistinguishable from domestic entertainment.
This is not to say that late-night satire and Iranian AI content are equivalent. But they operate within the same media ecosystem, where humor is the primary means of political communication.
The most disturbing thing about what’s happening now is what this means for our information environment.
Given that propaganda and satire are indistinguishable, and that satire accumulates millions of views while news does not, the line between political entertainment and political persuasion has seemingly collapsed. And the people most affected are those who think they are not defending the war at all.
