by Ray Morgan, University of Cambridge Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS)/incoming PhD student
On 10 March 2026, just under two weeks after the United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes on Iranian nuclear and military facilities, a short animated video titled “Narrative of Victory” began circulating across social media platforms. Foreign Policy described it as the most effective piece of war propaganda of 2026. Produced in a Lego-style aesthetic and set to a hip-hop soundtrack, it was not the work of Iranian state television. It came from Explosive Media, a small outfit based in Iran, reportedly employing fewer than ten people, which had until then described itself publicly as an independent, student-led media group.
The video was not an isolated artefact. It was one of roughly ten Lego-style animated productions released by Explosive Media in the weeks following 28 February, each drawing heavily on American political anxieties: the Epstein files, Trump’s Truth Social image presentinghimasamessianicfigure, IsraeliinfluenceoverUSforeignpolicy. Simultaneously, a parallel information effort was unfolding through Iranian diplomatic accounts on X, as official embassy and consular handles across dozens of countries shifted from conventional public communications toward a strategy of coordinated, irreverent, and often overtly comedic engagement with the war. Together, these two channels constitute what the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) has described as a “stark reversal in Iran’s messaging.” Whether that campaign constitutes disinformation in any technically defensible sense is far less obvious than the label implies. This blog post treats that difficulty as a test case for the conceptual apparatus of counter-disinformation research, and for its capacity to account for the ambiguity and complexity of current information practices.
Two Channels, One Campaign
Any serious analysis of the Iranian information campaign must begin by distinguishing its two principal components, because their differences matter analytically. Explosive Media operates in an ambiguous institutional position. In an April 2026 interview for the BBC podcast Top Comment, the group’s representative, identified only as “Mr Explosive,” initially denied any government connection. Under further questioning, he acknowledged that the Iranian government is a “customer” of Explosive Media, having issued direct commissions for specific projects, an admission he had not previously made publicly. He defended the relationship as honourable, describing his work as service to the homeland. The group has continued to present itself as independent, and its content carries no official attribution.
The diplomatic network is a different matter. Iranian embassy and consular accounts on X are verified, operate under the institutional identities of recognised diplomatic missions, and are staffed by government personnel. Their content during the war has been formally attributed and publicly accessible. The analytical question they pose is therefore not one of attribution; it is one of register and intent.
What connects the two channels is not their institutional position but their function. From my analysis of these accounts’ activity prior to 28 February, the Iranian diplomatic X presence was largely conventional: formal statements, observances of national occasions, repostings of official positions. Standard diplomatic handles. The war changed that with considerable abruptness, and the scale of what followed was substantial.
The coexistence of these two channels is not incidental. Western counter-disinformation frameworks, most influentially the Actors, Behavior, Content framework, treat transparency of source as the primary criterion separating legitimate public diplomacy from manipulation. The Iranian campaign deliberately straddles that boundary: Explosive Media provides plausible deniability through its nominal independence and absence of attribution markers, while the diplomatic accounts provide overt, verified attribution. Calling this a single coordinated campaign risks overstating how unified Iranian messaging actually is. Iran’s own leadership has been visibly split between a moderate negotiating camp and hardline factions that have worked to undermine it, and there is no open-source evidence that Explosive Media and the diplomatic network answer to the same authority. What can be said with more confidence is that the two channels function together, whatever the degree of coordination behind them: depending on which one is being examined, the result is simultaneously classifiable and unclassifiable under the same framework. That tension is not an inconvenience to be resolved before the real analysis begins; it is the analytically significant finding. It shows that the criteria used to separate legitimate public diplomacy from disinformation cannot, on their own, sort this kind of campaign into one category or the other, and the subsequent sections should be read as evidence for that claim.
The Embassy Network: Troll Diplomacy at Scale
The scale of the transformation in Iranian diplomatic posting behaviour is documented in detail by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, whose analysts Krysia Sikora and Joseph Bodnar tracked roughly 150 verified Iranian diplomatic and official X accounts across the 50 days before and after the outbreak of war. Those accounts nearly quadrupled their output over the period, rising from approximately 10,500 to 40,000 posts. Likes increased more than 30-fold, from roughly 660,000 to 22 million, while total views climbed from 55 million to 896 million. Six individual accounts each received more likes during the first 50 days of the conflict than all monitored accounts combined in the preceding period.
The content driving this engagement bore little resemblance to conventional war communications, although the underlying tactic is not without precedent: researchers have traced a similar reliance on humour and satire in Russian state broadcasting’s efforts to legitimise Kremlin foreign policy. On 5 April, Trump issued an expletive-laden post on Truth Social demanding Iran reopen the Strait of Hormuz or face strikes on its power plants and bridges. The Iranian Embassy in Zimbabwe replied: “We’ve lost the keys.” The Embassy in South Africa joined in: “Shh... the key’s under the flowerpot. Just open for friends.” The Embassy in Bulgaria added a sharper edge: “Doors open for friends. Epstein’s friends need keys.” The exchange, reported by Al Jazeera, illustrated the coordinated yet decentralised character of the campaign: each account built on the previous post without any visible directing architecture.
Earlier, when Trump announced an 8 p.m. deadline for Iranian capitulation, the Zimbabwe embassy had replied: “8 P.M. is not that good. Could you change it to between 1 and 2 P.M., or if possible, 1 and 2 A.M.?” NBC News reported that the embassy posts were part of a broader pattern in which Iranian diplomatic accounts had embraced a strategy of reactive, comedic engagement designed to go viral on Western platforms. The Embassy in Moscow, as Al Jazeera noted, shared an illustration depicting Trump as Don Quixote charging at a windmill. The Embassy in Tajikistan shared what became the single most-viewed post across all tracked diplomatic accounts: an AI-generated video in which Jesus slaps Trump into a pit of fire, responding directly to the president’s Truth Social image presenting himself as a messianic figure. It received 24.1 million views.
As Lawrence Cline observes in the Small Wars Journal, it is not possible from open sources to determine whether the embassies were receiving common themes from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or whether they were independently identifying opportunities. What is clear is that the cumulative effect was significant. ISD concludes that the campaign helped shift Iran’s international image from that of a repressive theocracy toward that of an irreverent underdog confronting the United States, a reframing that Foreign Policy described as arguably Iran’s most notable strategic gain of the war thus far. The “irreverent underdog” positioning is itself a familiar move: RT has long brandished a comparable underdog status against a hypocritical Western establishment, part of what Hutchings and his coauthors term its populist repertoire (2024, 21).
Explosive Media and the Logic of Cultural Targeting
The Explosive Media productions operate through a different logic, though one that is analytically related. Where the embassy accounts exploited the affordances of X through speed and reactive humour, Explosive Media produced more sustained cultural artefacts: finished, high-quality animations that circulated across platforms and into contexts well beyond the diplomatic social media environment. Press coverage has taken to calling this genre of AI-generated, culturally fluent propaganda “slopaganda,” a portmanteau of AI slop and propaganda that has stuck for good reason: the material is disposable and mass-produced in form, yet precisely targeted in effect.
Emma Briant, a British expert on information warfare and propaganda, noted that “these new technologies have given Iran an ability to leverage culture in a way that they never have been able to before,” adding that even five years ago, producing content that was “culturally entertaining and sticky to a Western audience would have been very, very difficult.” The observation points to something structurally significant. The videos are not directed at Iranian audiences, who face severe internet restrictions in any case. They are produced in English, targeted at Western and specifically American viewers, and their effectiveness depends on a detailed attentiveness to the cultural materials of the intended recipient.
The content is not generic anti-Americanism. It is precisely calibrated. The Epstein motif speaks to a specific domestic American anxiety about elite impunity; the Trump-as-Jesus imagery responds directly to content Trump himself posted on Truth Social; the references to Israeli influence over US foreign policy track a debate that has intensified within American political discourse. Mr Explosive chose the Lego aesthetic, he told the BBC, “because it is a world language.” That formulation is instructive: the choice of format is itself a translation decision, selecting a visual idiom developed within and associated with Western popular culture as the vehicle for delivering Iranian political messaging. Whether this reflects direct consultation with Russian state broadcasters, of the kind reported between Chinese and Russian international media, or an independent convergence on a shared authoritarian playbook, is not something that can be settled from open sources.
The evasion embedded in Explosive Media’s public positioning deserves attention in its own right. The pattern of initial denial followed by partial acknowledgement under direct questioning is a recognisable feature of what counter-disinformation researchers describe as information laundering: the use of nominally independent intermediaries to distance state actors from content they have commissioned or sponsored. Hutchings and his coauthors describe a comparable outsourcing model in Russian state media more broadly, in which propaganda functions are delegated to nominally independent producers, or freelancers, who operate within Kremlin-set parameters while competing for its favour (2024, 34). The Iranian government’s status as a “customer” rather than an employer may be a meaningful distinction in contractual terms, but it does not alter the functional relationship between the state and the content. That the relationship required sustained BBC questioning to elicit even a partial confirmation is itself analytically significant, regardless of how the content is ultimately classified.
Propaganda specialist Briant described the videos as “highly sophisticated,” noting that AI tools trained on Western data help create culturally familiar messages for global audiences. The New Yorker noted that the videos had become “inescapable artefacts” of the war. In terms of reach, ISD found that two pro-Iran networks collectively accumulated more than a billion views on X within the first month of the conflict.
YouTube removed Explosive Media’s channel on 12 April 2026, citing violations of its spam, deceptive practices, and scams policies. The videos continued to circulate on X, TikTok, Instagram, and other platforms. As Cline notes in the Small Wars Journal, American embassies in Bahrain, Indonesia, and Azerbaijan reportedly sent cables to the State Department arguing that the US needed to mount a more proactive response to Iranian information operations. The removal of the State Department’s Counter Information Manipulation and Interference office in April 2025 had, in Cline’s assessment, materially weakened the capacity for a coordinated reply.
Three Problems for the Disinformation Framework
The campaign poses three interlocking challenges to the categories through which counter-disinformation monitors have typically approached these phenomena.
The first and most fundamental concerns the choice of definitional criterion. The two most widely used frameworks in the scholarly literature generate different outcomes when applied to this case. Intent-based definitions, which locate disinformation in deliberate deception about source or in the fabrication of factual claims, produce ambiguous results for both channels: Explosive Media’s government relationship was obscured rather than openly declared, but the content itself is predominantly satirical rather than factually false, and the diplomatic accounts are fully attributed. Effect-based definitions, which locate disinformation in the manipulation of political attitudes irrespective of factual accuracy, capture both channels straightforwardly, but at the cost of sweeping in a very wide range of political communication that Western governments engage in as a matter of routine. The productive analytical observation is not simply that the answer is unclear, but that the choice of definition is itself a political act. Counter-disinformation monitors have historically selected whichever criterion produces the desired attribution in a given case. The Iranian campaign makes that selection problem unusually visible, because no single criterion produces a clean result.
The second challenge concerns attribution and the limits of the transparency criterion specifically. Western regulatory frameworks broadly hold that overt, attributed communication is acceptable and covert, disguised communication is not. Explosive Media occupies a position this criterion cannot resolve. Its content carries no attribution markers, circulates through independent social media channels, and reaches audiences who encounter it as organic content. The initial public denial of any government connection, followed by partial acknowledgement only under sustained questioning, fits the pattern of information laundering as described in the research literature. Whether the output constitutes disinformation in a technically precise sense depends on definitional choices the existing literature has not settled, but the strategic ambiguity about source is a classifiable practice in its own right, and one that the transparency criterion was designed to address.
The third challenge concerns the relationship between disinformation and cultural context, which is of direct concern to the (Mis)Translating Deceit project. The Iranian campaign represents a case of cross-cultural adaptation more sophisticated than the model typically assumed in counter-disinformation analysis. The content produced by Explosive Media is not translated from Persian into English: it is synthesised from within the cultural environment of its target audience. The Lego aesthetic, the hip-hop soundtrack, the Epstein motif, the messianic Trump imagery: these are American cultural materials repurposed as vehicles for Iranian political messaging. The translation at work is not linguistic but cultural and affective, and it assumes a set of anxieties and dispositions already present in the target information environment. That this form of targeted cultural adaptation is precisely what earlier Western counter-disinformation doctrine condemned as a hallmark of Soviet active measures, and that it is now being deployed against Western audiences by a non-Soviet actor with considerable effectiveness, is a finding that the Cold War binary structuring most existing frameworks has no ready category for. Defenders of that binary might respond that a wider democratic and autocratic divide still captures Iran within it. But the harder problem is the proliferation of grey zone actors operating between official state discourse and grassroots popular culture, whose alignments follow platform incentives as much as ideology and who cannot be reliably sorted into either category.
Conclusion
The Iranian information campaign of 2026 is unlikely to prove historically anomalous. The techniques it has deployed (AI-generated cultural content, platform-native aesthetics, affectively targeted messaging, and coordination across official and semi-official channels) are accessible to any state actor prepared to invest in them, and their demonstrated effectiveness will not go unobserved. What the campaign reveals beyond its immediate strategic significance is a set of analytical gaps in the frameworks currently used to monitor and counter disinformation. Those frameworks were built around a particular model of the problem: covert, attributable to a specific adversary, and operating primarily through fabricated factual claims. The Iranian campaign is partly overt, operates through humour and satire as much as fabrication, and exploits cultural materials indigenous to the target audience rather than importing a foreign political vocabulary.
Addressing those gaps would require, at minimum, two things. First, applying effect-based definitional criteria consistently across state actors, regardless of political alignment, rather than selecting whichever criterion produces the desired attribution in a given case. Second, a treatment of strategic ambiguity about source, what this blog post has called grey zone positioning, as a classifiable and analytically serious practice in its own right, rather than as an anomaly that falls between existing categories. The Explosive Media model is its clearest instance. Neither move is straightforward, and both carry implications that extend well beyond the Iranian case.
Whether the content produced by Explosive Media and the Iranian diplomatic network constitutes disinformation in any analytically defensible sense is a question this blog post does not attempt to resolve. The more productive question, and the one this project is well positioned to pursue, is why the answer is as difficult to arrive at as it is, and what that difficulty reveals about the conceptual apparatus we are deploying.