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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/opinion/brick-by-brick--how-iran-won-the-communication-war">english.almayadeen.net</a>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Brick by Brick: How Iran won the communication war</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Chirinne Zebib</div>
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<div class="gmail-reader-estimated-time" dir="ltr">May 21, 2026</div>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><p>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.</p><div><ul id="gmail-content-slick-0"><div aria-hidden="false"><li>
<a href="https://alpha-en-media.almayadeen.net/media/image/2026/5/21/ad31afee-b801-4934-9176-e1fae09d47a9.jpg?width=1000" tabindex="0"><img src="https://alpha-en-media.almayadeen.net/media/image/2026/5/21/ad31afee-b801-4934-9176-e1fae09d47a9.jpg?width=1000&preset=w750" alt="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)" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img"></a>
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)
</li></div></ul>
<p>"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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Since the outbreak of the war and even with the beginning of
negotiations, the number of Trump\u2019s 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.</p>
<p>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\u201d, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>This is precisely what academics in 2025, Michal Klincewicz, Mark Alfano, and Amir Ebrahimi Fard, have termed <em>Slopaganda</em>:
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>Explosive Media</em>, 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.</p>
<p>Block by block, Iran is dismantling the American imperialist Lego empire and rewriting the rules of the game.</p></div></div></div>
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