The operation behind some of the most-watched propaganda of the current Iran war runs on fewer than ten people. This is slopaganda: AI-generated content in service of propagandistic ends, produced at a scale and sophistication that deserves attention from anyone interested in how communication is changing.

Its representative, who goes by Mr Explosive, appeared in a BBC interview silhouetted against red and green light, the colours of the Iranian flag, with a green-feathered helmet on his desk, likely a reference to a central martyr figure in Shia Islam. Explosive Media initially described itself as entirely independent. Under questioning, Mr Explosive conceded that the Iranian government is a “customer.” The videos are distributed through Iranian state media and amplified by state-linked accounts on X, reaching vast audiences.

A separate but parallel operation, the state-run Revayat-e Fath Institute (Narration of Victory), is producing its own Lego-style propaganda directly. Its watermark has been identified on some of the most widely shared clips. Both operations appear to sit within, or close to, Iran’s regime-aligned information ecosystem.

The aesthetic choice, Mr Explosive told the BBC, is deliberate. Lego, he explained, is “a world language.”

To be clear: this is propaganda produced in the service of a brutal theocratic regime, one that has spent decades crushing dissent at home, sponsoring violence abroad, and killing large numbers of its own citizens during the protest crackdown of 2025 and 2026. Nothing in what follows should be read as admiration. Understanding how something works is not the same as endorsing who it serves.

Two operations, two strategies

What makes the Explosive Media operation analytically interesting is not the technology. It is the targeting.

This content is not designed primarily for an Iranian domestic audience. It is constructed largely for American and global consumption, built from the raw material of American cultural anxiety. The videos tap into existing US opposition to the war. They reference the Trump-as-Jesus meme. They invoke the Epstein files and push the theory that Operation Epic Fury was launched to bury it. One clip depicted the Iranian military capturing a downed US pilot, contradicting the US account of a successful rescue, and found real traction with audiences who chose to believe it.

The operation is not injecting wholly foreign narratives into the American conversation. It is taking stories that already exist there, packaging them with consistency and cynical comic framing, and making them visually entertaining enough to share. The content also deploys antisemitic tropes, a reminder that the packaging of the format does not sanitise the ugliness of its messaging.

The American administration’s communication operation works on entirely different logic. It is loud, visually aggressive, and aimed squarely at its domestic base. On social media, the White House and Pentagon have leaned into meme aesthetics, pop-culture references, and video game-style edits, while Trump’s own online presence has continued its familiar pattern of self-mythologising provocation, including Christ-like imagery and public attacks on Pope Leo XIV. These are not aimed at winning over a global audience. They are aimed at sustaining domestic enthusiasm for a conflict whose rationale has never been clearly articulated.

The contrast in discipline is striking. The Trump operation is noisy but contradictory, different messages for different moments, with no consistent case for the war. The Iranian Lego operation, by contrast, has one visual language, one emotional register, and one focused target: to amplify the doubts of the American domestic audience.

Calling this low-effort content would be a mistake. What has changed is not that good communication has become cheap. It is that a small, focused operation can now reach an audience that once required industrial infrastructure.

The playbook behind the playbook

None of this emerged from nowhere. Emotional content over factual argument, repetition over nuance, institutional distrust as fuel: these mechanics have powered other high-intensity narrative battles in recent years, from anti-vaccine communication to anti-institutional political messaging more broadly. What is new is not the playbook. It is that the last remaining constraint, production cost, has been dramatically reduced.

The philosophers who coined the term slopaganda describe its deeper effect as the dilution of what they call the epistemic environment: the world of what we think we know. People become more likely to misidentify authentic content as fake. Trust collapses not just in the obviously false, but in the genuinely true. Steve Bannon named the doctrine before the tools existed to deploy it at this scale: flood the zone. The goal is not persuasion. It is exhaustion.

The broader lesson for communicators

Europe still holds to a core belief: that policy is shaped by the right people, in the right room, at the right time.

That belief is not wrong. But it is no longer the whole truth.

The people in those rooms do not arrive as blank slates. They arrive shaped by the cultural and online context they live in. That context is now being produced by actors the EU does not see, in formats the EU does not use, aimed at audiences the EU does not speak to. The European reflex, when confronted with a viral narrative, is to reach for a factsheet. That is the exact instinct this environment punishes. As I argued in an earlier piece on communication as the connective tissue of strategy and influence, what matters is not only the formal conversation, but the environment that shapes it before it begins.

That is the broader lesson here. Not that every institution should mimic what we are seeing in this war, and certainly not that democracies should borrow the ethics of authoritarian propaganda. It is that new formats, new creative grammars, and AI-enabled production are changing how debates are shaped, how narratives travel, and what reaches people emotionally before a formal argument is ever made. Formats once dismissed as unserious or marginal can frame debates, reinforce doubt, and reach audiences in ways many institutions still fail to anticipate.

This is also where narrative autonomy for Europe becomes something other than an abstraction. If Europe cannot shape the cultural context in which its own decisions are understood, someone else will do it. The rules of communication are not static. They never have been. What this conflict shows is that they are evolving faster than most institutions have recognised, and that the skills and approaches required to operate in this environment need to be tested and refined continuously.

This article was originally posted by Philip Weiss on Linkedin