[News] Brick by Brick: How Iran won the communication war

[Anti-Imperialist News]

english.almayadeen.net
<https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/opinion/brick-by-brick--how-iran-won-the-communication-war>
Brick by Brick: How Iran won the communication war
Chirinne Zebib
May 21, 2026
------------------------------

Iran successfully outmaneuvered the United States in the online
communication battle by combining sarcasm, AI-generated media, memes, and
Western cultural references to reshape perceptions of the war.

   - [image: Block by block, Iran is dismantling the American imperialist
   Lego empire and rewriting the rules of the game. (Al Mayadeen English;
   Illustrated by Zeinab el-Hajj)]
   <https://alpha-en-media.almayadeen.net/media/image/2026/5/21/ad31afee-b801-4934-9176-e1fae09d47a9.jpg?width=1000>
   Block by block, Iran is dismantling the American imperialist Lego empire
   and rewriting the rules of the game. (Al Mayadeen English; Illustrated by
   Zeinab el-Hajj)

"Hey Trump, you are fired." Delivered in English, on camera, by Brigadier
General Ebrahim Zolfaghari, spokesperson for Iran's Khatam al-Anbiya
Central Headquarters, this short message went viral across the world. The
video was not AI-generated, yet it captured global attention through its
sheer sarcasm and its use of a language and cultural reference immediately
familiar to American audiences and to the president himself.

This moment was not an isolated stunt. It was emblematic of a broader and
more calculated Iranian communication strategy. From official statements
filled with mockery on social media platforms to Lego-style AI-generated
videos satirizing American officials, Iran has positioned itself as a
surprisingly dominant force in the online communication battle. By speaking
directly to Western audiences in their own language, their own cultural
codes, and with a tone that oscillates between provocation and humor, Iran
has succeeded in seizing control of the war narrative online and in
winning, on that front, a degree of support from Western public opinion.

Propaganda has always been an integral part of warfare, long considered an
essential tool for shaping public opinion by controlling the narrative of
conflict. The first academic studies conducted by the American Harold
Lasswell established that propaganda functions as a non-coercive weapon
capable of mobilizing entire populations during moments of crisis. Modern
war, according to Lasswell, is fought on three simultaneous fronts:
military, economic, and propaganda. With technological development, the
communication war took a sharper turn, becoming more intensified and
formalized as what we now call strategic communication.

Today, social media platforms and increasingly AI have become the primary
instruments enabling the rapid manipulation and shaping of public
perception via mass production and instant distribution of visual media,
much of it AI-generated. The Israeli-American attack on Iran now stands as
arguably the first conflict that can be described as an AI-native
communication war, where images and videos have reached a kind of paroxysm,
fully weaponized in the battle to control the war narrative.

On the American side, the propaganda machine had little that was truly
innovative. It remained largely centralized around the persona of Trump
himself, his out-of-the-diplomacy-playbook language, and his arrogant and
repetitive speeches mocking not only his adversaries but also his own
allies. Trump's words and presence are ubiquitous: outrageous, yet
strangely ambiguous at the same time. A politician who says one thing and
its opposite in the same breath has produced deeply confusing messages for
his audience, giving the impression that the war's agenda and objectives
are unclear even to the American administration itself.

Since the outbreak of the war and even with the beginning of negotiations,
the number of Trump’s public interventions has continued to increase. This
is particularly visible on social media, where he has been highly active,
posting multiple times in very short periods, sometimes more than a dozen
posts within less than an hour. Frequent warnings, threats, ultimatums, and
real-time updates, widely reported as repetitions of the same arguments,
are textbook features of classic propaganda technique. Yet the threats here
operated at another level entirely.

The media agenda and the war narrative produced what can only be described
as a yo-yo effect, lurching from "the war is nearly over," a message
seemingly calibrated to calm oil markets and public opinion, then swinging
back to threats of erasing Iran from the map and promises of hell. From
nuclear prevention war, to regime change war, to crushing Iran's "proxies”,
and back again. This constant shifting generated contradictory narratives
on the American side, leaving a growing segment of the American public with
the perception that the administration did not truly know why it had
entered the war in the first place.

In the communication battle, that confusion has a cost: credibility. The
overall communication of Trump and the American administration framed the
conflict as a classic us-versus-them narrative: Western civilization as the
rational, righteous good, against them, the evil, chaotic, and dangerous
civilization that must be subdued and shut down. This framing transforms
the war narrative into a system of ideological representation, one that
functions as a powerful propaganda tool. Trump's discourse fits almost
perfectly into Edward Said's theory of Orientalism: language and
representation have historically been weaponized by the West to dehumanize
and primitivize the "other," constructing the enemy as an existential
threat to be eliminated, thereby justifying the war against Iran.

This narrative was further reinforced by videos produced and published
through official accounts and platforms such as the White House and Trump's
own accounts, featuring monochrome, grainy aerial footage of US strikes on
Iranian targets, alongside low-quality propaganda videos recycling
celebrity imagery and pop culture references to celebrate the attacks.
These types of visuals are designed to desensitize the public and make war
look like a video game, distancing the American audience from the reality
of what is happening on the ground. As the French philosopher and
sociologist Jean Baudrillard would say, it is as though the war did not
take place, the public watches instead a clean, cool, and sanitized
conflict, stripped of destruction, blood, and death, replaced by aerial
shots and montage videos, some of them AI-generated.

This is precisely what academics in 2025, Michal Klincewicz, Mark Alfano,
and Amir Ebrahimi Fard, have termed *Slopaganda*: AI-generated content,
often low quality or rapidly produced, designed to manipulate and influence
political and public opinion at a massive scale. It is generated instantly
and distributed in massive volumes through social bots and algorithms,
making it a particularly potent and hard-to-counter force in the online
information environment.

On the other side, Iranian communication during the war came as a complete
surprise. A calculated mix of traditional Iranian political communication,
provocative yet delivered with calmness and subtlety, and an entirely
innovative approach built on trolling and AI technology. To counter-frame
the official American war narrative, Iran adopted Trump's own techniques
but pushed them to a higher and more sophisticated level. They simply, but
far more subtly, spoke his own language back at him.

Every Trump social media statement was met with memes and sharp trolling
from Iranian embassies and official accounts. His ultimatums were
systematically dismantled with sarcasm. When he threatened to force Iran to
open the Strait of Hormuz, the Iranian response in English was deadpan and
disarming: Iran had lost the key, they said. Every response of this kind
broke the internet, going viral well beyond Iranian or Middle Eastern
audiences and landing directly in Western public discourse.

This trolling strategy was further amplified by a series of AI-generated
animated videos that turned Lego into a propaganda weapon. Lego characters
representing Trump and American officials were depicted as confused, lost,
and humiliated with pointed references to domestic American scandals such
as the Epstein file. One animated video, titled Vengeance for All, showed
Iranian missiles taking revenge not only for Iran but on behalf of all
oppressed peoples: Native Americans, victims of the African slave trade,
and the victims of the genocide in Gaza. In doing so, Iran inverted the
American good-versus-evil frame entirely: American imperialism becomes the
evil, and the oppressed nations of the world become the good.

These videos reveal something important: Iran did not only prepare for this
war militarily, but also psychologically. It studied Trump, mapped the
weaknesses of the American administration, and built a communication
strategy around those fault lines. The AI-generated content was produced by
a small Iranian team operating under the social media name *Explosive Media*,
specifically engineered to travel fast and reach international platforms.
Their target was not the Iranian public, but the Western one, and most
pointedly, American citizens themselves. Produced in English, loaded with
sarcasm, American cultural references, and humor familiar to Western
audiences, these videos replaced the old rhetoric of "Death to America"
with something far more unsettling and effective: empathy. They showed
American citizens how their own administration was deceiving them, holding
them hostage to a war built on shifting objectives and hollow
justifications.

Block by block, Iran is dismantling the American imperialist Lego empire
and rewriting the rules of the game.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20260521/20e8d187/attachment.htm>