From Tiny Channel to Global Phenomenon with Lego and Artificial Intelligence
Picture a YouTube channel posting political videos and racking up just a few hundred views per clip.
Nothing special, right?
Then, out of nowhere, everything changes.
Last year, a channel called Akhbar Enfejari — or Explosive News — started posting a mix of digital content with a political and moralistic tone on YouTube. A young Iranian man appeared on camera delivering commentary on Middle Eastern news in full influencer mode, lit by a ring light against a neon backdrop. AI-generated animations highlighted the importance of determination and offered tips on how to deal with Iran’s water crisis. The channel and a related Instagram account had a clear anti-Western slant, but the clips weren’t exactly thrilling. Most barely cracked a few hundred views.
Then, in February of this year, Explosive News found its sweet spot with something nobody saw coming: AI-generated animated propaganda against the U.S. war on Iran, made in the style of Lego movies, with world leaders caricatured as big-headed yellow minifigures and missiles rendered as colorful plastic bricks.
Yes, you read that right. 🧱
The result? Millions of views, global shares, and an intense debate about the boundaries of communication in times of armed conflict. These clips were reshared by Iranian government accounts, promoted by Russian state media, and even co-opted by No Kings Act protesters because of their flashy, anti-Trump visuals.
The Explosive News case isn’t just an internet curiosity — it raises a real alarm about how artificial intelligence is reshaping propaganda production in the 21st century and how an anonymous group of Iranian students managed to dominate the geopolitical narrative with virtual Lego bricks and digital editing tools. 🚀
The Message Behind the Plastic Figures
The political message in the videos is as blunt and cartoonish as the Lego characters on screen. In one clip, Lego Iranians celebrate missiles flying toward Tel Aviv while an AI-generated rap track plays in the background. The song is called L.O.S.E.R. and features lyrics like taste the ash of defeat. In another scene, a Lego tombstone reads R.I.P. Donald John Trump. The White House appears in flames after being hit by a missile.
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The videos express a raw solidarity with victims of American aggression, past and present. In one clip, Lego missiles carry English-language messages honoring everyone from Native Americans to Vietnamese villagers and enslaved people. The phrase ONE VENGEANCE FOR ALL appears in capital letters across the screen.
But it doesn’t stop there. The videos also show fluency in the language of conspiracy theories and online trolling. One references rumors that Benjamin Netanyahu was taken out in Iranian strikes and replaced by a deepfake. Another, feeding frenzied speculation about Trump’s health, shows a bruise appearing on the Lego president’s hands. One clip portrays Lego Trump examining photos of himself and Netanyahu in Jeffrey Epstein’s files before creating a distraction by launching the missile that hit an Iranian girls’ school last month.
The flood of imagery triggers a surreal kind of unease. The subject matter is deadly serious — an international war unfolding in real time and killing thousands of people — but the visual language is absurdly trivializing. It’s like watching a humanitarian catastrophe recreated inside an amusement park. And it’s precisely that contradiction that hooks people’s attention. 😶
Who’s Behind Explosive News
Some news outlets have described Explosive News as having ties to the Iranian regime. Forbes, for instance, pointed out that the Lego videos were reposted on Telegram by Tasnim News, an outlet affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Jerusalem Post noted that certain clips carried what appeared to be a watermark from Revayat-e Fath, the name of an Iranian state media foundation.
However, during an email exchange this week, a representative of Explosive News claimed the channel is fully independent — no government, no military, no state TV. Regarding Revayat-e Fath, he explained it was simply the Persian title of two videos they released: Victory Chronicles 1 and 2. When pressed by a fact-checker about possible regime ties, he responded evasively: Is there any way for you to prove you have no connection to Jennifer Lawrence?
He described Explosive News as a student-led media team with a background in social activism and said the individuals behind the channel prefer to stay anonymous out of concern that viral fame could turn them into targets in the military campaign. He added with a touch of irony: Fun fact — some of our former universities have been bombed. Yeah, a lovely gift from Donald Trump to Iranian science and culture.
How the Videos Are Made
Explosive News published its first Lego-style videos during the U.S. and Israeli bombing campaign against Iranian nuclear facilities last June. When the war officially kicked off in February, the representative said the team was already locked and loaded, with plans ready and engines revved — and by day two, the Lego-style videos were back in action.
The production process works like this: the team writes scripts and then generates the matching visuals using AI tools and digital editing. Working full-time, they can turn around a two-minute video in roughly 24 hours. That speed is impressive and shows just how dramatically artificial intelligence has slashed the time and cost needed to create visually striking content. 🤖
The Group’s Stated Motivation
American viewers used to the MAGA style of provocation might expect the Lego videos to be driven by a kind of clickbait nihilism — the throwaway type of content designed purely to go viral. But the Explosive News representative spoke about the work with an almost poetic seriousness.
He said every scene, every frame, every hidden detail and every idea in the videos are like the team’s children. He cited a Persian proverb — what comes from the heart will surely find its way to the heart — and said the group hopes their videos can inspire viewers with a glimpse of a different kind of spirit, something more poetic, more human, maybe a little kinder.
Those might not be the first words that come to mind when you’re watching clips of a Lego Trump whose plastic backside is frequently on fire. But Explosive News sees itself waging a battle between truth and falsehood. As the spokesperson wrote: Quick wisdom from the Quran — the most noble are those who remain just.
Why the Format Worked So Well
There’s a pretty clear logic behind the Lego-style visual choice, and it goes way beyond aesthetics. Lego is one of the most recognized brands on the planet, directly associated with childhood, fun, and something safe and harmless. When you see a video with that look — colorful bricks, characters with round heads and neutral expressions — your brain automatically lets its guard down. It’s a powerful psychological trigger because the format completely contradicts the content being delivered. And that contradiction is exactly what grabs people’s attention, making them watch all the way through trying to figure out what they’re seeing.
On top of that, the format strips away the visual weight that normally comes with content about armed conflict. Real images of war are disturbing, and a lot of people instinctively look away. When the same subject is presented with plastic characters and toy-like settings, the emotional barrier drops dramatically, and the message reaches a much wider audience — including people who would normally avoid that kind of content.
From a technical standpoint, artificial intelligence was essential for making all of this work at scale. Image and video generation tools allow for the creation of complex animations at a fraction of the cost and time that traditional animation would require. The channel was able to pump out content at a high pace with consistent visual quality without needing a large team or a significant budget. This is a game-changer in the history of propaganda — for the first time, groups with limited resources can compete at a production level with much larger and better-funded organizations. 🎯
But however pure the team’s stated intentions may be, the Lego videos succeeded in part because they met political discourse at the level to which it had already sunk. The Trump administration itself waged meme-driven battles on official social media accounts, complete with deportation ASMR videos, white supremacist inside jokes, and bombing compilations interspersed with video game imagery. According to reports, Trump receives a daily two-minute highlight reel of successful strikes on Iran to stay up to speed on the war — a kind of private military TikTok for a commander-in-chief with a limited attention span.
As the Explosive News representative put it: We believe that the dominant narratives of Israeli-American media often present acts of force, injustice, aggression, and even violence in a polished and attractive manner through the power of media. And he added: Let’s be honest — if the truth isn’t flashy, it gets pretty lonely.
A.I. as a Narrative Weapon — The Concept of Slopaganda
Last year, three media researchers published an academic paper titled Slopaganda — a new 21st-century term describing the intersection of generative artificial intelligence and propaganda. The authors argue this emerging form is especially toxic, both because it’s produced quickly and cheaply and because it introduces mass personalization, crafting tailored messages and narratives on the fly.
Slopaganda has quickly become a kind of new lingua franca of international conflicts. CCTV, China’s state broadcaster, produced an AI animation explaining the Strait of Hormuz blockade using martial arts references, with Iranians depicted as anthropomorphized cats and Trump as a grandmaster with an eagle head launching ridiculously expensive golden bombs. The Iranian Embassy in The Hague’s X account posted an AI-generated animation portraying Trump’s inner monologue as a hive of demons in the style of Pixar’s Inside Out. And the Iranian Embassy in South Africa posted a video referencing that famous COVID-era TikTok of a man longboarding to Fleetwood Mac — this time celebrating the Iranian bombing of Tel Aviv.
But the Explosive News videos may be the most potent example of slopaganda the world has seen yet, shifting hearts and minds — or at least generating a staggering number of clicks — one exploding toy ship at a time. 💥
The Platform Removals and What Came Next
Last weekend, YouTube and Instagram abruptly removed the Explosive News accounts. Instagram did not respond to requests for comment, but a YouTube spokesperson stated that the channel was taken down for violating the platform’s spam, deceptive practices, and scams policies. The Explosive News representative, for his part, blamed the ban on false flag media actions by Zionist actors.
However, the videos remain accessible on X and other platforms, and the removals seem to have done little to curb their reach. The representative said the team was initially surprised by the international attention, since the content was aimed exclusively at Iranian viewers. But as they got a better feel for the preferences of a broader audience, they started shaping the videos for that global crowd.
Last week, the group’s Telegram channel began posting in English instead of Persian, and the group expanded its name from Explosive News to Explosive Media. On Tuesday, they posted a teaser on X for a new video featuring bombs raining on flaming bald eagles and a Lego Moses watching the conflagration from a pyramid engraved with Trump’s face.
In the current geopolitical climate, maybe slopaganda is just another path to global media stardom. As the representative put it: We’re dreaming bigger. New formats, cinematic vibes, maybe even longer-form work. Who knows?
The Bigger Debate This Case Has Opened
After researchers and news outlets started noticing the Explosive News phenomenon, the conversation around the case quickly expanded into questions far bigger than a single YouTube channel. The central discussion is about the responsibility of distribution platforms — YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, X — to identify and moderate content that uses artificial intelligence to produce political propaganda disguised as entertainment. This is still very loosely regulated territory, where platform policies are always playing catch-up with the creativity of content producers and rarely manage to keep pace.
There’s also an important conversation about the role of generative AI in this specific context. The tools that allow for the creation of videos and animations with high visual quality are becoming increasingly accessible, affordable, and easy to use. That’s a positive thing for independent creators, artists, and small-scale legitimate content producers — but it creates the exact same favorable environment for anyone looking to pump out propaganda and disinformation at scale. The same resource that democratizes artistic creation also democratizes the production of biased narratives, and there’s no clear line separating one use from the other.
For the general public, this case serves as a valuable reminder about the importance of consuming content critically, especially during times of conflict and political tension. Videos with playful aesthetics, humor, or entertainment-style formatting aren’t automatically neutral or harmless — in fact, those formats can be the most effective vehicles for delivering ideological messages precisely because they seem less threatening. Recognizing this doesn’t mean you have to stop engaging with creative content, but it does mean keeping an extra layer of awareness about who’s behind what you’re watching and what narrative is being built. 👀🧩
At the end of the day, Explosive News left a mark that goes beyond views and shares. It showed, in very concrete terms, that artificial intelligence is already a real tool of narrative power in the modern world — and that virtual Lego bricks can be just as politically loaded as any other communication format the history of propaganda has ever produced. 🌐
