An Iranian missile strikes a U.S. aircraft carrier. A photo of ambulances illustrates a TV news report proclaiming that hantavirus infections are “sweeping across France.” A realistic video shows desperate Ukrainian soldiers bemoaning the collapse of their front
lines.
Every one of those AI-generated images this spring were fake, and their messages were lies. But they reached millions of viewers on worldwide social media within days. Those examples represent a tiny sampling of a new wave of AI propaganda. One professor called that surge “Slopaganda.” Foreign Policy proclaimed a new “meme war.” And POLITICO described the wave in terms of skirmishes in an “online battlespace.” Propaganda and disinformation are nothing new. But AI now offers tools capable of generating convincing and lightning-fast memes that can be difficult to distinguish from reality. Whether propagandists are based in Tehran, Moscow, Beijing or Washington, new AI techniques are being used worldwide.
“AI is breaking like a wave on publics already struggling to come to terms with social media,” says Nicolas J. Cull, author of Selling War and other books on propaganda and public diplomacy. “It is exponentially increasing the flow of political propaganda.” This spring, much of the focus has been on Iranian disinformation. An analysis by the London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) found that posts by about 150 official Iranian accounts gained about 900 million views over the first 50 days of the war. Iran’s effort, the ISD report said, “offers a blueprint that authoritarian actors can replicate in the future.”
Among the most effective AI-generated Iranian videos featured Lego-like yellow figurines to lampoon President Donald Trump. One video showed Iranian military blowing up U.S. ships in the Strait of Hormuz while a cartoon Trump sweated in bed when he saw the skyrocketing price of gasoline. Another video, set to rap music, depicted Trump as a “loser” and a puppet of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Those Lego-style videos, created by a small group called Explosive Media with ties to
the government, were widely shared by official Iranian government accounts. And the videos –produced in English when the nation’s internet had been shut down– clearly were aimed at an international audience.
To be sure, it is ironic that Iran – whose leaders have ordered the execution of tens of thousands of dissenters, exported violence, called for the destruction of America as “the great Satan,” and glorified martyrdom for decades – is seeking to use trolling and
propaganda to burnish its international image.
Cull said the Lego videos are “designed to challenge U.S. claims and embarrass the Trump administration by keeping certain arguments in play: the alleged need to distract the country and the world from the Epstein story; the subservience of the US to Israeli policy; tragedies like the mistaken bombing of the girl’s school and the simple fact that Iran has survived the bombardment.”
Jessica Brandt, who directed the Foreign Malign Influence Center at the U.S. national intelligence directorate from 2023 until last year, wrote recently in the New York Times that Iran’s Lego-style videos and similar clever use of pop culture references to ridicule the Trump administration “has been effective in its reach.”
Brandt argues that the Lego-style videos and other satirical content constitute a new and perhaps more effective tool: “It’s not disinformation. It’s not traditional war propaganda. It’s trolling,” she wrote. “No one is being deceived because deception isn’t
the point. Reach, ridicule and cultural resonance are.”
The incessant trolling and disinformation have distorted some social media platforms. In the early weeks of the Iran war, WIRED reported that X (formerly Twitter) had become “unhinged from reality” because it was “flooded with disinformation by accounts sharing fake and repurposed videos.”
The magazine found that X’s AI arm, Grok, had “repeatedly given false information when asked to verify claims made on the platform. AI images are being shared by paid accounts bearing blue check marks and Iranian officials seeking to portray exaggerated Damage.”
Iran is hardly the only culprit. Critics contend that the Trump administration’s meme-heavy approach invited and exacerbated the sort of cartoonish propaganda spread by its adversaries. In the war’s early weeks, the White House posted “hype videos” to TikTok and X, at times weaving Top Gun, Call of Duty and Iron Man montages with footage showing actual drone and missile strikes against Iranian targets. After Trump threatened to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Age,” an Iranian account in Asia countered with an AI-generated image of Trump as a caveman: “Back to the Stone Age already?” the Iranian post said. “We have been a civilization for thousands of Years.”
Taking the opposite approach to hype videos, Trump’s “Department of War” took pains during the war’s early weeks to obscure the extent of the severe damage that Iranian missiles and drones caused to U.S, bases in the Middle East, Investigative reporting by several news organizations, using independent satellite images and other sources, reported a much broader pattern of destruction than initially acknowledged by officials at Pentagon briefings.
In a report issued at the end of April, the American Enterprise Institute calculated that Iranian attacks caused about $5 billion in damage to 70 structures at 11 American military bases in seven countries. And the Congressional Research Service reported on May 13 that at least 42 U.S. military aircraft were lost or damaged during the Iran war — considerably more than detailed by the Pentagon.
The Trumpian “hype video” memes sparked domestic as well as international criticism. Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago told 60 Minutes: “It is sickening to splice together movie cuts with actual bombing and targeting of people for the purposes of entertainment.”
While demonizing the enemy is as old as warfare, Cull says the active participation by the president in such propaganda sets a precedent. “Wartime culture belittling the enemy and glorying in destruction emerges in every war. But one hasn’t previously seen the president himself sharing it.”
Russian Propaganda Leads the Pack
Even though Iranian disinformation and trolling have gotten recent attention, Russia has been the uncontested leader in both techniques for decades and is now sharpening its propaganda arsenal with effective AI tools.
In 2014, shortly after Moscow-backed militants first invaded eastern Ukraine, a government-controlled TV channel reported that Ukrainian soldiers had “crucified” a 3- year-old son of a pro-Russia militiaman in a public square. That outlandish and false
report was amplified by social media within minutes but took weeks to discredit. A few months later, when a Russian militia’s surface-to-air missile shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine, the Russian propaganda machine shifted into high gear with dozens of reports falsely claiming that the plane was hit by a Ukrainian missile, someone had planted a bomb on the airliner, or that the aircraft itself was at fault.
If a similar crash had happened today, the Russians would have deployed sophisticated AI-honed images to sharpen that disinformation, which is now spread using hundreds of internet domains as well as the government-controlled RT (formerly Russia Today) international news network. While most Russian propaganda now focuses on the Ukraine war, Moscow’s AI surrogates also spread disinformation about Western nations
– including the U.S., U.K., and France – it views as enemies.
In May, the non-partisan NewsGuard website rating system identified ten phony news reports (four videos and six news articles) published on anonymous X accounts, about the supposed spread of hantavirus in France. NewsGuard reported that the bogus
accounts bore the hallmarks of Matryoshka, one of several Russian influence Campaigns.
In what appears to be a new approach, Russian disinformation specialists have been hijacking the individual accounts of actual users of the liberal BlueSky platform to post fake propaganda accounts. Researchers at Clemson University linked the tactic to the Moscow-based Social Design Agency.
Valentin Châtelet, a research associate at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, wrote in April that Russia’s Pravda (“Truth”) network – fraudulent news portals targeting more than eighty countries – is “an information laundromat, amplifying and saturating the news cycle with tropes emanating from Russian news outlets and Kremlin-aligned Telegram channels.”
Châtelet reports that Pravda has been “poisoning AI tools and Wikipedia” with disinformation. By posing as authoritative sources on Wikipedia and reliable news outlets cited by popular large language [IT] models, Russian tropes are rewriting the story of Russia’s war in Ukraine.”
Separately, Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD) reported that a new Tik-Tok wave of Russian video disinformation features AI-generated Ukrainian soldiers supposedly stationed on the front line. Those fictional soldiers complained bitterly of indifferent commanders, collapse of defensive lines, and Russian infiltration – all of which were untrue.
As of May, NewsGuard had tracked 561 domains that have promoted false claims about the Russian-Ukraine conflict. These websites include official Russian state media sources as well as sites that avoid sanctions because they are not official propaganda Arms.
Most of the “myths” analyzed by NewsGuard demonize Ukrainian fighters or reject reports of Russian atrocities. However, the Ukrainians also employ propaganda. NewsGuard has debunked some pro-Ukrainian and anti-Russian memes, including AI- manipulated images of so-called “Ghost of Kyiv” and misleading footage of alleged Russian attacks.
Propaganda in Perspective
Propaganda is as old as human civilization, dating back to the sanitized account of pharaohs’ military victories as portrayed by inscriptions and carved reliefs in ancient Egyptian temples. Cull calls such disinformation “an enduring element in political history, something that is always there, something that we always have to be looking for.”
Over the millennia, each side in wars have demonized their enemies. What has changed is the availability of new tools to convey that disinformation. And AI, which can generate convincing images in a flash, is just a sophisticated tool.
“While the medium of AI is new, the experience of the sudden explosion in materials intended to stir audiences delivered via a new platform is not,” said Cull, a professor of public diplomacy at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
“Much the same destabilization happened when moveable type, popular newspapers, radio and other electronic media hit audiences,” Cull said, adding: “Unfortunately, the track record for human society coping with these new techniques is not good.” In an email exchange with the GJR, Cull said he expects that “AI will be seen as a tool and the debate will shift to the message rather than an unacceptable medium … AI is currently making it harder for ordinary people to evaluate the veracity of news, which is a great argument to seek out the most reliable platforms.”
Asked what can be done to the AI onslaught, Cull said “we need to respond by drawing attention to manipulation and teaching media literacy and media-specific skepticism. I think that it is a vital task of educators in any age to equip audiences to be on the alert for media manipulation.”
However, promoting media literacy at home does not help ameliorate the damage to the U.S. reputation abroad, which is the main target of recent Iranian propaganda. In her op-ed, propaganda expert Brandt suggested that the U.S. government needs “regular threat intelligence reporting from the big America AI companies” as well as “a public diplomacy strategy that acknowledges the existence of the new trolling threat” and responds with messaging that “is also clever, shareable and fluent in the cultural idiom of the audience.”
In April, the New York Times reported that administration officials “appear increasingly worried that a growing number of anti-American narratives are taking root worldwide.” A recent State Department cable urged embassies to American embassy and consulate this week to do more to push back against foreign propaganda campaigns.
The irony is that Trump administration officials, shortly after taking office in January 2025, had moved to dismantle several government bodies that aimed to track and combat foreign influence operations. Those included disinformation teams at the FBI, the National Intelligence director’s office and the State Department. The administration also sought to silence the government’s international news services and broadcasts, including the Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe. Trump loyalist Kari Lake was asked to carry out that mission.
After a federal judge ruled in March that Lake did not have the authority to shrink VOA to a skeleton staff, the Trump administration appealed but at the same time pushed Lake aside and nominated Sarah B, Rogers, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, to lead the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees VOA. Efforts are underway to bolster the VOA’s Iran-language broadcasting. But the VOA – which in the past had broadcast in 49 different languages, reaching an estimated 360 million listeners worldwide – has been reduced to the point that it only broadcasts in languages targeting listeners in Iran, China, North Korea, Afghanistan, and Kurdish Areas.
In the AI propaganda era, is traditional public diplomacy the most effective approach to counter AI memes deployed by antagonists such as Iran and Russia?
“Social scientists have long been aware of the so-called ‘third person effect’ whereby if you explain the power of a particular form of propaganda people become concerned about the gullibility of others rather than themselves,” says Cull.
“So, calling out AI is not alone the answer. We need to keep talking about how messaging works [and] maybe remember that the most powerful propaganda is that which engages with what an audience already thinks.”
Robert Koenig is a former Post-Dispatch Washington correspondent. In 2014-15, he
helped the U.S. Embassy in Moscow analyze Russian propaganda related to Ukraine.
