Iran Turned Trump and Netanyahu Into LEGO Characters Using AI — And Millions Shared It Before Realizing It’s Propaganda

Sometime in early March 2026, a two-minute animated video began spreading across social media in which Donald Trump, flanked by Benjamin Netanyahu and a figure representing the devil, browses a photo album labeled “Jeffrey Epstein File” before pressing a large red button and launching a missile at Iran. Every character in the video is rendered as a LEGO minifigure. The soundtrack is a catchy, AI-generated rap. The visual register is children’s television.

The video was shared widely on X, Reddit, Facebook, and TikTok — often by accounts that appeared to find it funny or absurdist — before many users realized they were amplifying state propaganda. According to Snopes, the video circulated under multiple accounts, with the earliest traced to a profile based in Iran created in June 2025. Snopes confirmed the creators also operated the originating account, though it could not independently verify a direct chain of command to the Iranian government.

Credit for the videos has been claimed publicly by a group styling itself the “Explosive News Team,” which described itself on X as “that Iranian Lego animation guys.” In email correspondence cited by The New Yorker, the group claimed to be student-run and independent. Researchers and journalists who traced the production back through distribution channels found a different institutional fingerprint. Media coverage attributed the series of videos — which predates the March wave and stretches back to the outbreak of the conflict — to the Revayat-e Fath Institute, an Iranian state-run body with documented links to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The IRGC-controlled Tasnim News Agency shared at least one video in the series.

The content of the videos is not ambiguous in its intent. Across multiple installments, AI-generated missiles rain across the Middle East, sending blocky LEGO figures — Orthodox Jewish men in Israel, Saudi sheikhs in the Gulf — scattering across rubble. Some sequences include imagery of small plastic shoes near destroyed structures, invoking civilian casualties through the language of children’s toys. Other videos depict Iranian forces defeating miniature US and Israeli soldiers. The Epstein narrative thread recurs: multiple videos assert that Donald Trump launched the war to suppress the Jeffrey Epstein sex-trafficking investigation, with one describing him as “bleeding for a puppet,” referring to Netanyahu.

The choice of format is not incidental. As NPR reported, the LEGO aesthetic exploits a structural weakness in how platforms moderate content. Automated systems on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube are trained to detect realistic violent or military imagery; LEGO-style visuals register as playful, not threatening, and pass through initial filters unimpeded. The videos reportedly reached millions of views before human moderators flagged them. Dan Butler, a political science professor at Washington University in St. Louis, noted that the format exploits the fact that “people like Legos and will tune in to watch Lego-based films” — an engagement dynamic that exists independently of the political content being carried.

Generative AI makes the format newly viable at scale and speed. As analysts noted to Time, earlier generations of LEGO-style animation required frame-by-frame manual construction; AI video generation tools now build every frame from scratch with stylistic consistency. Researchers also observed that AI tools allow creators to add micro-expressions to plastic figures — small emotional cues that direct sympathy toward depicted victims without triggering the critical reading that photorealistic war imagery typically prompts. The simpler and more playful the format, the less likely viewers are to apply editorial judgment before sharing.

Emerson Brooking, a researcher at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, described the broader phenomenon to Time as “the commodification of war — becoming part of the attention economy.” The viral reach of the LEGO videos dwarfs that of individual news reports covering the actual conflict. 404 Media reported that pro-Iran AI-generated content, including the LEGO series, scored millions of views across X, Meta platforms, and TikTok with minimal enforcement action from those platforms through late March 2026.

The campaign sits inside a much larger information environment. Since Operation Epic Fury — the joint US-Israeli offensive that began on February 28, 2026 — the conflict has generated what researchers describe as an information war of historically unprecedented technological scale. The New York Times identified more than 110 distinct AI-generated images and videos in the first two weeks of fighting alone. Euronews reported that Iranian state media had ramped up a coordinated disinformation campaign from the opening days of the conflict. NewsGuard tracked 50 distinct false claims in the conflict’s first 25 days, an average of two per day.

Iran’s LEGO output is not the only AI-assisted influence operation running in the theater. Researchers at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab documented a coordinated network called “PRISONBREAK,” linked to Israeli-backed operators, that used AI-generated imagery, deepfakes, and accounts mimicking real news outlets to push content targeting Iranian domestic audiences. Both sides are using AI-generated content; the difference with the LEGO campaign, analysts note to France 24, is that it is explicitly aimed at Western public opinion, designed to travel through Western social media ecosystems by matching the visual grammar of content those audiences already share.

Platforms had not issued public statements addressing the LEGO video series by the time of publication. A Forbes report from March 28 noted that X, Meta, and TikTok remained silent on the matter even as the videos continued to accumulate views. The practical challenge for moderation is that the content does not obviously violate hate speech policies and is structured to read as satire, a category that platforms have historically been reluctant to remove at scale.

Dan Butler’s observation about LEGO’s appeal points to the deeper problem. The currency of social media is engagement, not accuracy. Content that combines a universally recognizable format — plastic toys known to virtually every demographic on earth — with a jarring political context produces the share-before-thinking response that propaganda, in any era, is designed to generate. What AI has changed is the cost and speed of production, and the ability to tune the format precisely to platform moderation blind spots. The Revayat-e Fath Institute can now produce at volume what once required significant animation infrastructure. The Explosive News Team’s next video may already be in distribution.