How viral AI cartoons are doing what missiles can’t
Have you noticed?
The war isn’t just in Iran. It’s in your feed.
But who would have thought the weapon of choice would be LEGO?
I, for one, never thought I’d see the day when we weren’t just consuming propaganda, we’d be distributing it.
Willingly.
With accompanying emojis.
But, here we are.
“Explosive News!”
In 2025, a new YouTube channel was launched.
Akhbar Enfejari, or “Explosive News!” was about as explosive as a fart in a bathtub. It barely made a blip amongst the 120 million channels competing for eyeballs.
The message from its Iranian creators was consistently anti-Western. “Send this video to filthy America so it explodes,” it urged its 2.5 viewers.
Then, in February this year, something changed.
And the world changed with it.
That something was that America and Israel attacked Iran. And the brains behind Explosive News struck on a winning formula, co-opting an animation style nicked from the LEGO movies, and adopting Western pop-culture tropes to communicate their anti-American and anti-Israeli message.
Now, it’s a smash hit.
While Trump and his limp-dicked armchair warriors send Americans into battle, millions of viewers tune in to rapid-fire, scathing responses to the war that isn’t a war created by what the New Yorker describes as a group of students with a background in social activism.
The creators’ original intention was modest. They wanted to reach Iranian viewers. But now, they’ve gone—can I say “ballistic,” given the circumstances? Probs not.
Let’s just say they’ve gone “global.”
Their clips have been reposted on X not only by Iran’s Tasnim News Telegram, but also by the Russian state media agency, RT.
Their messaging isn’t particularly nuanced or sophisticated. They align themselves and the Iranian people with other groups who have suffered at the hands of American hegemony: Vietnamese; Native Americans; Afghans.
One of their more potent recent clips set against a catchy reggae tune digs into Trump’s connection to the child-rapist, Jeffrey Epstein… allegedly, as they are careful to point out.
The team can produce a two-minute clip in just 24 hours; a feat that would be impossible without the pre-mix, pre-fab, ready-to-wear visual tool that is generative AI.
Since they first appeared, there have been many pretenders attempting to replicate their success. Those pale imitations lack something vital. Perhaps it’s the fire in the belly.
But the Iranian Revolutionary Guard are not the good guys
Let’s be absolutely clear. The men at the helm of the Iranian regime are not the good guys. Quite the opposite.
I do not, by any measure, support a political apparatus that hangs people from cranes for fancying someone of the same gender. That’s right. They use construction equipment to murder their citizens.
Amnesty’s human rights report on Iran makes for sobering reading.
Its penal code includes flogging. Blinding. Amputation. Crucifixion. Stoning.
Iranians who fall foul of the law… things like peacefully protesting, letting a lock or two of hair escape from under a headscarf, or daring to drive a car if someone is unfortunate enough to have been born with a vagina… are disappeared into torture facilities colloquially known as “fingernail factories.” And it goes without saying that the brutal torture dished out in those prisons includes sexual violence.
And women aged 13… actually, let’s call them what they are: 13-year-old children are deemed old enough to walk down the aisle. Although fathers can apply for an exemption if they want to marry off their baby girls even younger than that.
So, yeah.
Getting stoned.
Getting stoned in Iran does not mean what it does in the West.
Roll in the hay with someone you’re not married to?
Stoned to death.
Sneak a cheeky alcoholic beverage?
Stoned to death.
Same-sex snogging?
Stoned to death.
Just last week, an 18-year-old musician, Amirhossein Hatami, was convicted of moharabeh – enmity against God – and executed after months of torture following his arrest during the anti-regime protests in January.
So…
The mullahs are not good people.
No argument from me on that.
But that’s not what I’m talking about here.
Where I’m going with this is to look at what’s being called “slopaganda.”
This is a canary in the coal-mine moment for the world. And right now, that bird is gasping for air.
Because even if the brains behind Explosive News claim they’re completely independent of the Iranian regime, thanks to slopaganda, they have achieved the impossible.
They have made the bad guys sympathetic.
“If truth isn’t flashy, it’s kinda lonely.”
Explosive News knows its audience. “Let’s face it,” they say. “If truth isn’t flashy, it’s kinda lonely.”
And their punchy, on-point clips are certainly flashy. They go viral because they’re so fucking shareable.
The Trump administration’s counterpunch?
Cringeworthy, triumphalist mash-ups of real-life footage from America’s attacks in Iran with Call of Duty clips. I almost called the paramedics to revive me from a crippling case of second-hand embarrassment.
It’s the equivalent of whacking a block of marble with a soggy facecloth.
Explosive Media’s efforts achieve everything Trump’s resident thumb-in-a-suit aka “communications” director, Stephen Cheung, has been unable to do via the White House’s amateurish attempts to win hearts and minds online.
So, what’s the difference?
It’s LEGO, for fuck’s sake!
I can tell you exactly why Explosive Media’s videos are making such a mark.
For a start, it’s LEGO. Who doesn’t have brilliant childhood memories of LEGO? Other than finding a piece with your foot in the shagpile.
Straight away, you’re hooked. Even though you’re watching bombs and flames and women and children fleeing in fear, it’s LEGO!
It’s co-opting an iconic and much-loved brand to communicate an idea. The warm-fuzzies it inspires make us drop our guard.
It’s the one guaranteed way of getting the attention of all those people out there who aren’t political; who don’t want to be confronted with grim scenes of death on the frontline.
It’s casting Mel Brooks as Hitler in The Producers.
The question, of course, is whether recasting psychopathic warmongers as bobble-headed and foolish toys diminishes the very real threat they represent.
That’s the payoff, I guess. Eyeballs on screen, yes. But at the cost of turning an existential crisis into a bit of a chuckle to like and repost.
But that’s what satire is all about.
Society stripped bare
Comedy and satire work because they pull back the curtain and reveal us for who we really are, not who we pretend to be.
Want to understand somebody? Learn what makes them laugh. It reveals more than you can imagine.
It’s even more true of an entire society. Find out what makes a community’s collective side split and you expose its soft underbelly.
Plato knew that. When a friend asked for a book recommendation so he might understand Athens, the philosopher recommended Aristophanes’ comedies.
Exposing our soft bits
Satire and humour have an important role to play in society.
Power takes its place on the podium. Humour’s job is to be the acid that eats away at the plinth while satire shines a light on its flaws. Neither is expected to offer a solution. Their job is to point out what’s not working.
There’s a long and noble tradition of comedians speaking truth to power with a brutality and frankness forbidden to others.
The court jesters of old were permitted to mock rulers without fear of retribution. They got away with quips against the rulers of the day that would have landed another’s head quite literally on the chopping block.
Jesters were given the fool’s cap and marotte mimicking the monarch’s royal crown and sceptre in acknowledgement of that unique right.
Even the deathly serious Martin Luther—he of the Reformation—used jest when he was ripping into the Catholic Church. He went so far as to call himself a court jester. And I’d like to believe that’s why he gave us the Diet of Worms, which will never not be funny to me.
Can you laugh at yourself?
That’s why a good measure of a person is their capacity to laugh at themselves.
With that in mind, it’s worth revisiting the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, when then-President Obama ripped the tangerine blowhard a new one.
Donald Trump—at the time nothing more than a civilian in the audience—was pushing the “birther” conspiracy; the furphy that Obama was born in Africa, rather than Hawaii.
Obama roasted Trump to a crisp and served him on a platter with sides and condiments. You can see Trump steaming. It would be a wonderfully satisfying scene, if you didn’t also know that this was reported to be the moment at which the Great Fatsby decided to run for office.
In a fit of pique, Donald boycotted the dinner entirely during his first term. He’s planning to attend for the first time on 25 April this year.
Instead of a comedian, the 2026 dinner will feature a TikToker who reads minds. So, the Donald should be safe, as he appears to have lost his.
Laughing your head off… no jokes
Top of the list on a society’s health report card is how well it deals with satire when it’s turned inwards.
Take a look at the French Revolution. It was a very serious affair. When the short-lived people’s uprising was pushed aside by Napoleon—a small man with imperial ambitions—and the French monarchy made a return in the first decades of the 19th century, an artistic revolution took place that inspired a blossoming of caricature and satirical drawings.
Cartoonists like Honoré Daumier became superstars; the 19th century equivalent of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Their work criticising politics and morals spread across the nation like wildfire in the publications, La Caricature and then Le Charivari.
But then, the monarchy turned. In 1832, Daumier was thrown into prison for depicting King Louis-Philippe as a grotesque, pear-headed monster.
By 1835, political satire was banned outright.
Sound familiar?
That’s why fascists fear humour most of all.
Autocratic regimes see humour as an existential threat for good reason.
They control the populace with fear, division and anger. Violence is the lingua franca of fascism. Come at a Nazi with a baton, and they know how to fight back.
But tackle them with a well-placed quip, and it stops them in their tracks.
That’s because they laugh at people. They love a pratfall… a bit of slapstick.
But laughing with others? The nuance of irony? Self-deprecation? Satire? Deadpan? May as well be speaking a foreign tongue.
The art of satire
There’s a distinction between two of the main forms of satire, both dating back to Roman times.
The Roman satirist, Horace (65-8 BCE) was known for gently mocking social vices and human follies. Horatian satirists aim to inspire smiles, rather than fury.
Think the gentle ribbing behind The Simpsons, or Saturday Night Live, which spotlights politicians’ personal quirks through good-natured mimicry, rather than painting them as evil.
Juvenalian satire is the flipside of the same coin. Juvenal was another Roman satirist who lived in the second century AD. His humour was abrasive and razor-sharp. If he was around today, he’d find a spot in South Park’s writers’ room
It’s tempting to see the two satirists as reflecting the times in which they lived. Horace was working during the dying days of the Roman Republic, while Juvenal lived through the birth pangs and power struggles that characterised the early Roman Empire. Juvenal used parody and exaggeration to make monsters out of the men who expected to be worshipped as gods.
Sound familiar?
Mary, Mary Quite Contrary
The Explosive News LEGO clips work so well because the best satire finds its way into our homes and everyday life. We understand it because it speaks our language.
And it survives. That’s why despots despise it. More often than not, satire makes more of an enduring mark than they do.
Case in point? Nursery rhymes. What better way to spread a message than to dress it up in bunting and deliver it to a baby’s crib?
Here’s just one example.
Mary Mary Quite Contrary isn’t a song about a woman who loves gardening. It’s a ditty about Bloody Mary, Henry VIII’s daughter. She’s also the “Bloody Mary” who gave us the drink.
Mary was a wild-eyed Papist as Britain was being torn apart by religious wars between the Protestants and the Catholics. Her “garden” in the nursery rhyme is about the graveyards she was filling with Protestant martyrs.
“Silver bells”? They were thumbscrews.
And “cockleshells”? Well, they were torture instruments used on male genitalia. And I don’t want to think too hard about that. But any man who heard his wife singing Mary Mary Quite Contrary to their wee ones back in the day would have been left with an enduring impression of the murderous queen.
Truth or fiction?
How much of that was truth? Who’s to tell?
Things like nursery rhymes, cartoons, and YouTube clips are effective because they’re woven into our social fabric. They have the potential to be Trojan horses; delivering a sucker punch to powerful forces that are too preoccupied with other business to see what’s going on in our living rooms.
That’s why they’re such a deadly instrument for propaganda.
Propaganda is the manipulation of beliefs to achieve a political end. As a term, it first cropped up in 1622, when Pope Gregory XV came up with the term Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, or “Congregation for Propagating the Faith,” to describe the papacy’s mission to spread the Catholic doctrine across the globe.
Slopaganda
In 2025, a trio of scholars used the word “propaganda” to coin the fucking genius term, ‘slopaganda’ for the unholy mash of generative AI slop and propaganda we’re grappling with today.
To demonstrate just how far up to our necks in slop we are, the authors quoted the following figure: News Corp Australia is currently dishing up 3000 stories generated by AI a week. That’s right. 3,000. Stories. A. Week.
With four out of every five Australians turning to News Corp for their news, that is terrifying.
And not just because it’s a media company that peddles the Murdoch family’s narrative and world view.
The long-term impact of what this saturation-level of AI-generated slop means for all of us is next-level horrific.
Because it goes deeper than just selling ideas.
It’s changing the way our brains work. And in the digital age, there’s no escaping it.
Spreading the word
Propaganda has always been linked to technology. When the printing press made its first appearance in Renaissance Europe six-hundred years ago, it was a big win for those with an agenda to push.
It gave us pamphlets. Gazettes. Posters. Then, as literacy improved and there were enough people who could read them, newspapers like the ones printed in post-Revolution France appeared.
But with the 20th century, things really took off. Hitler’s poisonous mouthpiece, Joseph Goebbels, invited himself into Germany’s lounge rooms and cinemas, and spread the Nazi doctrine far and wide across film and radio.
Then the 21st century dawned.
“Flood the zone with shit.”
That was Steve Bannon in 2020 during his impeachment trial.
Whatever else he is, Bannon doesn’t miss much. He knew then that the fact more people were tapping into online news sources was a potential goldmine for those wanting to shape the political narrative.
As “mainstream media” became a slur and “fake news” entered the vernacular, trust in the Fourth Estate was undermined. Today, most people rely on unregulated social media sources for their news.
Don’t have to look far to see how this can play out.
Remember the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where political advertising assisting the 2016 Trump campaign was created using data drawn from 67 million Facebook accounts without the users’ consent?
Cambridge Analytica is also believed to have helped sway the Brexit campaign.
Know who was one of the company’s vice presidents? Steve Bannon.
Yeah.
Amateur hour
But that was ten years ago. With the advent of generative AI, it’s amateur hour compared to what’s possible today.
Slopaganda can be produced and customised to target specific demographics at speed and in vast quantities.
We’re drowning in it.
And the means of digital dissemination available to flood the zone with shit makes the deluge almost impossible to stop.
Made to measure
But it’s more insidious than that.
Because the stories you encounter online are tailor-made to fit you.
This is something very new. And something we’re still grappling with, psychologically. Most of us are completely unaware of how comprehensively the things that appear on our screens are being filtered to fit whoever the algorithm thinks we are and, more ominously, what it wants us to think.
It used to be that you’d buy the same newspaper to read on the train into work as your mum, your neighbour, and the guy who had the desk beside you in the office. Sure, you’d all read the same article through a lens coloured by your unique life experience. But journalism back then was governed by a series of principles that held it apart from influence or opinion peddling. “Without fear of favour,” the saying went.
Today, you get news tailored to fit your beliefs, based on your online behaviour. This is a new form of propaganda.
It’s feeding you a party line you’ve already signed up for.
Attention economy
Slopaganda feeds you the same narrative, over and over. It confirms what you already believe, whether that’s based in fact or not.
And it works because there’s comfort to be found in the familiar.
The deluge of information available online is overwhelming. When we’re wading through the slop, we grab on to anything that seems familiar or looks entertaining.
That’s why Explosive News’ LEGO clips work so well. With limited time available to us, we’re careful about where we direct our attention.
Why so negative?
Bad stuff always does well online. No surprises there.
It’s an evolutionary survival mechanism. Remembering negative events might have saved your ancient ancestor’s life back in the days when they were wandering in the wilderness.
That’s why stories that trigger horror, fear, outrage, and grief have such an impact on us. Negative news worms its way into our brains because, subconsciously, we think one day it may save us.
Slopaganda taps into this.
It’s what Roland Barthes described as ‘exnomination.” It’s a “divide and conquer” method as old as the hills that reinforces negative stereotypes to create fear and suspicion between demographic groups. So, for example, reporting on crime committed by white people as “crime,” while at the same time describing crime by people of colour as “Black crime,” or “immigrant crime.”
By profiling you through your online behaviour, slopaganda will send content your way that magnifies your biases, preferences, and beliefs.
You’ll be ushered into a silo where all you ever hear are things you already think you know.
Microtargeting slopaganda will mean you never see anything that challenges your beliefs. And with what we now know about neuroplasticity, that is never going to work out well for us.
A divided population is a compliant population.
There’s a reason that works for would-be autocrats.
The people holding the reins of power would prefer us to waste our energy squabbling amongst ourselves rather than turning our attention to the shitfuckery going on upstairs.
That’s why there are no real moves to monitor and control the tsunami of slopaganda that’s drowning us. Why would they send us the lifeboats when it’s keeping us in check?
It’s bread and circuses for the modern era.
Bullshit Asymmetry Principle
And now, the world is doing Explosive News’ job for them. Gone are the days of having to head out in the dead of night with clag and brushes to whack propaganda posters up on billboards.
We’re posting and reposting their political rhetoric for them.
We’re all unwitting and unpaid promoters of Iranian propaganda.
I did not have that on my bingo card for 2026.
Last week, Explosive News’ YouTube channel was banned.
A short time later, it was resurrected on Instagram.
The Bullshit Asymmetry Principle.
Which leads us to “Brandolini’s Law,” or the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle.
In 2013, programmer Alberto Brandolini declared that the “amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.”
But there’s nothing new under the sun.
Jonathan Swift got there first in 1710 when he wrote “falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it.”
Strange days, indeed.
What do you think? Are you drowning in slopaganda? Or are you managing to stay afloat? Let me know in the comments.
