From anti-Israel Legos to fake footage, Iran’s AI propaganda owns the digital battlefield

In its latest war against Iran, Israel showed itself capable of fending off the vast majority of the hundreds of ballistic missiles and drones launched at it by the Islamic Republic.

But shielding itself from Tehran’s digital arsenal has proved significantly harder.

While the US and Israel have reportedly employed artificial intelligence in unprecedented ways to guide aerial strikes and help identify targets during the conflict, Iran has found ample use for generative AI on another front: the battle for hearts and minds.

Employing Western trends and cultural references, AI-generated photos and videos demeaning Israeli and US leaders, glorifying Iranian military capabilities and asserting the Islamic Republic’s resilience have garnered over a billion views online, seeding narratives pushed by Tehran among impressionable Americans and others.

Compounded by a parallel wave of AI deepfakes showing misleading content about the war, the meme-heavy content — much of which makes use of anti-Israel sentiment and antisemitic tropes — constitutes a growing challenge for Israel as it seeks international legitimacy and support for its military actions against Iran.

“Audiences unfamiliar with the conflict, younger audiences especially, are much more vulnerable and exposed to this kind of content,” said Daniel Haberfeld, co-head of the cyber terrorism desk at Reichman University’s International Institute for Counter-Terrorism, warning that the trend marks “a major threat” to getting  Israel’s message across.

Iran’s mastery of what some outlets have dubbed “slopaganda” has the potential to redefine the information war in a world where truth is increasingly difficult to discern, experts say. In an interview that aired Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu conceded that the arena was one in which Israel was falling behind.

“Israel is besieged on the media front, on the propaganda front, and we’ve not done well on the propaganda war,” he told CBS.

His comments came a week after US President Donald Trump admitted that while Iran has been militarily crushed, “they’re pretty good at propaganda.”

Asked about how Israel was responding to Iran’s viral AI content amid the war, the Foreign Ministry said it was working “on an unprecedented scale in the battle for public perception,” but declined to address Iran’s online activity.

Lego-powered hate

Some of the most viral content coming out of Iran has been a series of Lego-themed animations created by AI, which star Trump and focus on Israel’s purported control over America and the consequences of attacking Iran.

The videos — many of which were shared online by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Iranian embassies around the globe — generally take the form of short rap-style songs, with lyrics and imagery recalling real wartime news stories as well as conspiracy theories and antisemitic tropes.

One of the most viral, shared by Iranian state media without clear attribution to who created it, features clips of Trump trading the “America First” slogan to ultra-Orthodox rabbis in exchange for money and bowing alongside Netanyahu to the biblical Canaanite idol Baal. Both the song lyrics and imagery are replete with references to allegations of sexual abuse of children tied to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

Over the clips, an AI voice sings “Make Israel Great Again. Your government is run by pedophiles. They ordered you to die for Israel. They lied to you all,” sound the rap lyrics.

The references draw on some of the oldest antisemitic tropes, such as Jews being puppet masters who buy political loyalty from gentile rulers, and the medieval-era blood libel accusing Jews of murdering gentile children to harvest their blood for ritual sacrifice.

“The Lego videos are clearly aimed at an American audience that is anti-Trump and anti-war, as they heavily incorporate themes tied to US domestic politics,” said Holly Dagres, senior fellow at The Washington Institute.

She noted that Iranian embassy accounts in some countries that share the video “tend to emphasize themes of colonialism and anti-imperialism, messaging that resonates more strongly with audiences in the Global South.”

The Lego trend largely originated with Iranian media outlet Explosive Media, founded during Israel’s 12-day war against Iran in June.

The videos, produced by a team of around 10 Iranian students aged 18-25, have garnered billions of views across TikTok, Instagram and X, with a dual goal to project Iranian cultural sophistication and chip away at Western support for the war, according to a spokesperson for the group.

“We initially wrote the lyrics but then used AI to make it more relevant to the American culture,” an Explosive Media spokesperson told the BBC. “We’re students who understand the significance of media and politics… we also know how significant AI has become in this war.”

An Explosive Media spokesperson refused a Times of Israel request for comment, accusing a reporter of being “a professional journalist of babykillers” paid by the Israeli government to promote “propaganda.”

While Explosive Media presents itself as independent, its spokesperson acknowledged in media interviews that the Iranian regime is a “customer” and admitted “connections” to it, including selling distribution rights of some videos to state media. They called it “honorable to work for the homeland,” denying “allegations” that the regime had killed thousands of civilian protesters earlier this year.

The group’s internet connection is enabled by a journalist’s license granted by Iranian authorities, who have otherwise severed most of the country’s access to the global web since war broke out on February 28. They say that public donations cover their expenses.

MAGA or MIG? https://t.co/BKiIf58gtm pic.twitter.com/Y6l7ezjtNA

— Iran Embassy SA (@IraninSA) April 9, 2026

“Only those who can afford ‘Internet Pro’ or who have been whitelisted for access, including pro-regime journalists, analysts and influencers,” have been able to remain online, Dagres said, referring to the Islamic Republic’s program allowing approved customers a connection to the global internet for a hefty fee.

Internet-savvy youths aren’t only creating the memeable propaganda, but may also be helping Iran spread the content to the wider world, she added.

“There are countless media firms like [Explosive Media] inside Iran that take on contracts for commercials or with the clerical establishment, but it’s also possible that the same team or another group of clever pro-regime Gen Z social media operators in Iran is managing the Iranian embassies’ Twitter accounts as well,” Dagres said.

Speaking to the BBC, the Explosive Media spokesperson pushed back against accusations that the clips traffic in antisemitic imagery.

“I strongly reject that. Our videos are not anti-Semitic; our videos are anti-Zionist,” they said. “When we show Netanyahu drinking blood, we want to highlight atrocities committed by [the Israeli] regime.”

The spokesperson said the content was aimed at changing the opinions of those “who do not research and are fed lies. Our media is for those people.”

From bots to AI

Iran has long been an ardent purveyor of agitprop and other forms of influence operations aimed at shaping the opinions of Westerners, but its campaigns were often too flat-footed to have much impact or too narrowly focused to gain wide traction.

Efforts included social media campaigns harnessing bot armies and the launches websites targeting Americans and others, such as Afromajority.com, which scattered pro-Iran and anti-Israel content amid articles about racial justice and other issues relevant to US Blacks, according to a 2024 report by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

But the adoption of generative AI in the current war has supercharged Iran’s propaganda, allowing it to easily fine-tune its messaging to strike a chord with various audiences.

While Iran used AI to shape its wartime narrative in the 2025 war, “in the current war [the use of AI] accelerated much more significantly,” improving both the content itself and the frequency of its output, explained Haberfeld.

“In the past, you had structured [Iranian influence] campaigns with stages and planning. Here, with AI, you can constantly feed the algorithm. And it also allows you to generate different kinds of content with different messages for different target audiences, much, much faster,” she said.

In memory of the 168 innocent schoolchildren of #Minab whose lives were cruelly taken by the most evil people on earth.
Their names may fade from the headlines, but they must never fade from our conscience.#StandWithIran#WarCrime#مدرسه_میناب pic.twitter.com/sCG2kpfM71

— ☫ Iran Embassy in The Hague, The Netherlands (@IRAN_in_NL) March 12, 2026

Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and the Revolutionary Guards both have mechanisms dedicated to online influence operations and psychological warfare, though they rarely act transparently, Haberfeld said, explaining that they work covertly to “distance themselves from the activity while still financing a large portion of it.”

These mechanisms “almost always use various entities and different accounts that don’t openly identify themselves as the Iranian regime,” she said, noting “they especially prefer platforms like TikTok, whose algorithms tend to favor exactly the kinds of content they spread. But they also operate on Instagram, Telegram, Facebook, X, basically everywhere.”

While the impact of Iranian content on global perception and policymaking has yet to be quantified, “campaigns mocking leaders, belittling them, making them look ridiculous tend to gain traction internationally. They become viral,” she said.

"I have all the cards" clip is released also. https://t.co/Yyv8Qai1SG pic.twitter.com/NNvZsVqp0E

— Iran In Hyderabad (@IraninHyderabad) May 6, 2026

Beyond amplifying overtly pro-Iran messaging, AI has also been used to create fake videos presenting news consumers with realistic but fictional footage meant to exaggerate US and Israeli losses.

In the first month of the conflict, over 100 AI-generated videos and images related to the war collectively garnered millions of views online, most of them promoting pro-Iranian views and lacking visible watermarks, according to a March analysis by The New York Times.

Video shows Iran’s massive missile attack on Tel Aviv, Israel. BOOM found several visual discrepancies in the footage, including unusual car shapes, a blurred background, and distorted solar panels. An analysis using AI detection tools further confirmed that the video was…

— BOOM Live (@boomlive_in) March 5, 2026

These included a video purportedly showing a missile barrage devastating Tel Aviv, fabricated imagery of the USS Abraham Lincoln under attack, and content playing on rumors that Netanyahu was killed in Iranian strikes and had been replaced by a deepfake.

Highlighting the growing wariness surrounding the spread of such false content, Elon Musk’s X platform announced in March that those “who post AI-generated videos of an armed conflict” without disclosure would be temporarily suspended from receiving revenue from X.

Falling behind

In his CBS interview, Netanyahu admitted that Israel was falling behind in the perception war. Deteriorating US support for Israel “correlates almost 100% with the geometric rise of social media,” he said. The premier alleged that several countries, which he did not identify, have “basically manipulated” social media in a way that “hurt us badly.”

While pro-Iran memes and deepfakes were racing around the world, Israel was also waging a battle for popularity, making its own attempts to speak the internet’s language.

It's bulk season for Hezbollah. pic.twitter.com/NcoVr0gATj

— Israel Foreign Ministry (@IsraelMFA) May 10, 2026

Some examples include a post from the Foreign Ministry using a meme to mock ceasefire violations by Iran-backed Hezbollah, and an earlier video on the IDF’s Instagram page that demonstrated Israel’s success in defeating Iran’s “Axis of Terror” by showing former Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other leaders it had assassinated leaving a WhatsApp group chat.

The Foreign Ministry said its digital efforts and those of its missions abroad generated over 1.3 billion impressions across seven online platforms. Its advocacy also included hundreds of interviews with international media outlets to expose “the Iranian regime’s deliberate targeting of Israel’s civilian population.”

Netanyahu promised that Israel would try to redouble efforts to fight Iran’s AI-armed propaganda, but provided few details.

“We have to fight back against these lies, this propaganda, with the only weapon we have. It’s the truth,” he insisted. “I’m trying to do that now and will try to do that in a much greater effort because we’ve left the battlefield to our enemies.”

The cost of failing to catch up on the digital battlefield could be enormous, Haberfeld warned.

“The threat posed by influence campaigns and cognitive warfare is becoming increasingly prominent in modern warfare,” she said. “And not only Israel, but countries around the world now understand this and are trying to build specialized systems to identify, monitor, and counter this influence.”

“Even after the physical war ends, the cyber and digital war does not end.”