338
Iran’s AI memes are reaching people who don’t follow the news – and winning the propaganda war
(theconversation.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2026
338 points (97.7% liked)
Technology
83963 readers
2861 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Interviewer:
Iranian Cleric Shahab Moradi:
They're brilliant: using Lego to create violent short form cartoons. In a very "master-slave dialectic" way, it's quite apparent that Americans know nothing about the world while the rest of the world understands us all too well.
Having now read the article, I will also add that this article is exactly emblematic of why Western elites simply do not get this stuff. They don't even have language to describe it.
Describing these videos as "Trojan horses" is such a bad metaphor. Likewise all the fake-history and myth-making that being politically informative and entertaining are somehow left-wing phenomena invented by Jon Stewart.
People don't engage with politics rationally, they do it emotionally. Most people engage with most things emotionally; thinking is hard and energy-intensive. Easily absorbed cartoons and entertainment are not "Trojan horses" because there is no secret message. This is the fundamental misunderstanding conservatives have about media: the messages aren't secret, they are overt and obvious, you just aren't trained to understand them.
Taking a media illiterate person and flinging complex jargon and symbols at them makes them feel stupid, so they reject it. Feeding them simple symbols (made for children) that speak in the language of simple emotions makes them feel like an insider who understands secrets. This feeling is so good that people start hunting for symbols in things with limited understanding of how to properly do so or experienced knowledge, so they start finding whatever their mind expects to find: demons, angels, enemies, government communist agents, whatever they're afraid of.
Trump's camp has become so insular they've forgotten that even media illiterate people understand things like not being able to afford food while the president posts a video of himself shifting on you.