Perhaps you’ve seen the viral video, a satire rendered in Lego: President Trump launches missiles at Iranian power grids, then sweats through a nightmare and ends up rocking alone on the floor, crying, white surrender flag behind him, cease-fire papers at his feet. Through his tears, he eats a taco — a nod to the acronym for the phrase “Trump always chickens out.”
Since the Iran war began, Iranian officials and pro-Iran influencers have used A.I.-generated content like this — clever, highly shareable, fluent in pop culture references (Lego, Marvel, Forrest Gump) — to ridicule the United States or present Iran sympathetically.
The strategy has been effective in its reach. In the first 50 days of the conflict, official Iranian accounts on X earned roughly 900 million views and 22 million likes — more than 30 times their previous 50-day totals for likes, according to a recent analysis. During the same period, shares of content on these accounts rose from 4.3 million to 76 million. Many other Lego-style videos have gone viral, too, garnering tens of thousands of likes and millions of views on Instagram, TikTok and X.
In recent years, policymakers concerned about artificial intelligence and influence operations have tended to focus on deepfakes — voice clones and fabricated videos that are designed to deceive. That threat remains urgent: In the first weeks of the Iran war, social networks were flooded with A.I.-generated videos and images depicting decimated buildings that were never attacked and demoralized soldiers who did not exist.
But with the Lego-style videos and other satirical content, Iran and its supporters are using a different tool for influencing public opinion. It’s not disinformation. It’s not traditional war propaganda. It’s trolling. No one is being deceived because deception isn’t the point. Reach, ridicule and cultural resonance are.
The concern is bigger than Iran. China, a more capable, wealthier adversary that has been surprisingly bad at the online propaganda game, is watching and learning. Internal documents from the Chinese A.I. company GoLaxy, detailed in The Times last year, suggest that Beijing may already be considering experimenting with tools to track public debates within the United States, monitoring broad sentiment as well as the views and arguments of individual Americans. Pair that sort of capacity with the ability to use A.I. to generate large amounts of culturally fluent material, and you’ve got a recipe for increasingly sophisticated and targeted influence campaigns.
Anytime foreign adversaries have a tool for advancing their interests at our expense, the United States should have a robust strategy for countering its effects. In this case we don’t, and we should be developing one.
The strategies we use to combat covert foreign influence, such as exposure and sanctions, are irrelevant to efforts that aren’t hidden or illicit. The tactics we use to combat deepfakes, such as watermarking and labeling, aren’t relevant to videos that aren’t pretending to be authentic. And traditional tools of public diplomacy — education campaigns, formal statements of outrage — aren’t nimble enough to counter propaganda that resembles entertainment and disseminates with meme-like scope and speed.
We need action on two fronts. First, we need regular threat intelligence reporting from the big American A.I. companies. Many major social media companies in the United States regularly issue public reports of possible threats, domestic and foreign, that they detect on their platforms. These reports are essential reading for government analysts and university researchers. Our A.I. companies should adopt this practice. If Chinese companies that specialize in influence campaigns are feeding information about their tools and strategies into American-owned large language models, we should know.
Second, we need a public diplomacy strategy that acknowledges the existence of this new trolling threat, systematically tracks these campaigns in real time and responds with public messaging that is also clever, shareable and fluent in the cultural idiom of its audience. In March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio directed embassies to push back on coordinated propaganda efforts abroad. That instinct is right, but it requires reckoning with this latest form of propaganda.
Iran is exploiting a gap that our current defenses weren’t built to close. We need to address it before a more capable adversary decides to do the same.
Jessica Brandt is a senior fellow for technology and national security at the Council on Foreign Relations. From 2023 to 2025, she was the director of the Foreign Malign Influence Center at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
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