Explosive News posted its first Lego-style videos during the U.S. and Israel’s bombing campaign on Iranian nuclear facilities last June. When the war began, in February, the representative said, “Our team was ready, plans in place, engines revving—and, by day two, the Lego-style videos were back in action.” They started churning out new clips, writing scripts and then generating corresponding visuals using A.I. and digital editing tools. “Working full time, we can produce a two-minute video in about 24 hours,” the representative said.
American viewers who are accustomed to MAGA-style trolling might expect the Lego videos to be driven by a certain clickbait nihilism—brain rot, Tehran-style. But the Explosive News representative spoke of their efforts with a lofty earnestness. “Every scene, every frame, every hidden detail, and every idea in our work feel like our own children,” he said. He quoted a Persian proverb (“What comes from the heart will surely sit upon the heart”) and said that the team hopes that their videos can inspire viewers with “a glimpse into a different kind of spirit—something more poetic, more human, maybe a bit more gentle.” Those might not be the first words that come to mind when one watches clips of a Lego Trump whose plastic butt is often on fire. But Explosive News sees itself as fighting “a battle between truth and falsehood.” The spokesperson wrote, “Quick wisdom from the Qur’an: ‘The noblest are those who stay righteous.’ ”
However pure the team’s intentions, the Lego videos have succeeded, in part, because they meet the political discourse on the level to which it has already sunk. The Trump Administration has waged its own meme-based battles on its official social-media accounts with A.S.M.R. videos of deportations, white-nationalist in-jokes, and supercuts of bombings interwoven with video-game footage. Trump is reportedly shown a daily two-minute video montage of successful strikes on Iran to keep him up to date on the war, a kind of private military TikTok feed for a Commander-in-Chief with a toddler’s attention span. Even if Trump himself posts mainly on Truth Social, he is an image-obsessed creature of the internet; it stands to reason that Explosive News’ vengeful, mocking clips may actually reach his eyes, or at least grab public attention by speaking in the same showily combative terms as MAGA. With the help of A.I., the team can achieve a startling production value. As the representative put it, “We believe that dominant Israeli-American media narratives often present acts of force, injustice, aggression, and even violence in a polished and appealing way through the power of media.” He added, “Let’s face it—if truth isn’t flashy, it’s kinda lonely.”
Last year, a trio of media scholars published a paper titled “Slopaganda,” a new bit of twenty-first-century slang to describe the intersection of generative A.I. and propaganda. The authors argue that this burgeoning form is uniquely toxic, both because it is so quickly and cheaply produced and because it “introduces mass personalisation, creating tailored messages and narratives” in an instant. Slopaganda has quickly become our new Esperanto of international conflict. CCTV, the Chinese state broadcaster, ran an A.I. animation explaining the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz using martial-arts tropes, with the Iranians as anthropomorphized cats and Trump as an eagle-headed grand master unleashing expensive golden bombs. The X account of the Iranian Embassy in the Hague posted an A.I. animation depicting Trump’s internal monologue as an “Inside Out”-esque hive of demons, and the account of the Iranian Embassy in South Africa posted a slop video that referenced a famous COVID-era TikTok, of a man longboarding to Fleetwood Mac, to celebrate Iran’s bombing of Tel Aviv. But Explosive News’ videos might be the world’s most potent example of slopaganda yet, changing hearts and minds—or at least generating lots of clicks—one exploding toy battleship at a time.
Last weekend, YouTube and Instagram abruptly took Explosive News’ accounts down. Instagram did not respond to a request for comment, but a spokesperson for YouTube said that it had removed the channel for “violating our Spam, deceptive practices and scams policies.” (The Explosive News representative blamed the ban on “ ‘false flag’ media actions” by “Zionist actors.”) But the videos remain accessible on X and other platforms, and the removals seem to have done little to slow their reach. The representative said that at first the team was surprised by their international notoriety, because they’d aimed their content squarely at Iranian viewers, but that they’ve begun to mold the videos to a wider audience as they “better understand their preferences.” Last week, their channel on Telegram began posting in English instead of in Persian, and the group broadened its name from Explosive News to Explosive Media. This Tuesday, they posted a teaser on X for a new video featuring bombs falling over burning bald eagles and a Lego Moses watching the conflagration of a pyramid etched with Trump’s face. In the current geopolitical climate, perhaps slopaganda is just another path to global-media stardom. “We’re dreaming bigger,” the representative said. “New formats, cinematic vibes, maybe even longer works. Who knows?” ♦