Frozen copy retrieved 2026-08-15T06:05:00Z for audit 2026-08-15T05-42-37Z. Original URL: https://time.com/article/2026/04/02/when-virality-is-the-message-the-new-age-of-ai-propaganda/. The Stochastic Parrot does not host or redistribute; this snapshot exists solely so that quoted spans remain verifiable if the original page changes. Character offsets below index into this plain text; highlighted spans are the quotes cited in the audit.

When Virality Is The Message: The New Age of AI Propaganda

TIME · back to the audit
In March 2026, AI-generated videos depicting American President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as LEGO minifigures began flooding social media. Some were set to original rap tracks with surprisingly catchy hooks, likely also AI-generated. They told stories of the horrors of war: little shoes and a plastic backpack near rubble evoked the bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' school in Minab, Iran. Some connected the war to Trump's ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Media coverage attributed the videos, some of which were broadcast on Iranian state television in addition to spreading online, to the Revayat-e Fath Institute. The name translates to “The Narration of Victory”; coverage linked the content to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. However, most of the viral videos bear the logo of the “Explosive News Team,” a self-described grassroots group who have claimed credit on X for being “that Iranian Lego animation guys.” On the afternoon of March 28, they complained that their YouTube and Instagram accounts had been taken down. In email correspondence with The New Yorker, they claim to be student-run and totally independent; Revayat-e Fath, they say, is the Persian title of their videos. Are Explosive News “patriotic trolls” producing heartfelt content to support Iran's ruling regime, paid mercenaries leveraged for plausible deniability, or a state-run account posturing as independent? Other videos are more obviously state-linked: an Iranian Embassy X account posted an AI animation mocking Trump using visuals styled after the Pixar movie “Inside Out.” The trend is international and predates this war: LEGO-specific propaganda entered the state-media repertoire in April 2020 when China's Xinhua News Agency released “Once Upon a Virus,” viewed millions of times; Russia circulated fabricated LEGO sets ahead of Moldova's 2025 parliamentary elections. The White House has been creating AI-generated content too, including a video promoting Operation Epic Fury that opened in the style of Nintendo's Wii Sports, cut between war footage and cartoon bowling strikes; other videos spliced scenes from Call of Duty with real airstrike footage. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt bragged that the White House's videos had generated more than 2 billion impressions. Some analyst commentary argued that Iran's LEGO videos had outpaced Trump's. Social media users don't need to endorse a message to spread it. They only need to find it compelling enough to watch and share.