Explosive News posted its first Lego-style videos during the U.S. and Israel\u2019s bombing campaign on Iranian nuclear facilities last June. When the war began, in February, the representative said, \u201cOur team was ready, plans in place, engines revving\u2014and, by day two, the Lego-style videos were back in action.\u201d They started churning out new clips, writing scripts and then generating corresponding visuals using A.I. and digital editing tools. \u201cWorking full time, we can produce a two-minute video in about 24 hours,\u201d the representative said.<\/p>\n
American viewers who are accustomed to MAGA-style trolling might expect the Lego videos to be driven by a certain clickbait nihilism\u2014brain rot, Tehran-style. But the Explosive News representative spoke of their efforts with a lofty earnestness. \u201cEvery scene, every frame, every hidden detail, and every idea in our work feel like our own children,\u201d he said. He quoted a Persian proverb (\u201cWhat comes from the heart will surely sit upon the heart\u201d) and said that the team hopes that their videos can inspire viewers with \u201ca glimpse into a different kind of spirit\u2014something more poetic, more human, maybe a bit more gentle.\u201d Those might not be the first words that come to mind when one watches clips of a Lego Trump whose plastic butt is often on fire. But Explosive News sees itself as fighting \u201ca battle between truth and falsehood.\u201d The spokesperson wrote, \u201cQuick wisdom from the Qur\u2019an: \u2018The noblest are those who stay righteous.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n
However pure the team\u2019s intentions, the Lego videos have succeeded, in part, because they meet the political discourse on the level to which it has already sunk. The Trump Administration has waged its own meme-based battles on its official social-media accounts with A.S.M.R. videos of deportations, white-nationalist in-jokes, and supercuts of bombings interwoven with video-game footage. Trump is reportedly shown a daily two-minute video montage of successful strikes on Iran to keep him up to date on the war, a kind of private military TikTok feed for a Commander-in-Chief with a toddler\u2019s attention span. Even if Trump himself posts mainly on Truth Social, he is an image-obsessed creature of the internet; it stands to reason that Explosive News\u2019 vengeful, mocking clips may actually reach his eyes, or at least grab public attention by speaking in the same showily combative terms as MAGA. With the help of A.I., the team can achieve a startling production value. As the representative put it, \u201cWe believe that dominant Israeli-American media narratives often present acts of force, injustice, aggression, and even violence in a polished and appealing way through the power of media.\u201d He added, \u201cLet\u2019s face it\u2014if truth isn\u2019t flashy, it\u2019s kinda lonely.\u201d<\/p>\n
Last year, a trio of media scholars published a paper<\/a> titled \u201cSlopaganda,\u201d a new bit of twenty-first-century slang to describe the intersection of generative A.I. and propaganda. The authors argue that this burgeoning form is uniquely toxic, both because it is so quickly and cheaply produced and because it \u201cintroduces mass personalisation, creating tailored messages and narratives\u201d in an instant. Slopaganda has quickly become our new Esperanto of international conflict. CCTV, the Chinese state broadcaster, ran an A.I. animation<\/a> explaining the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz<\/a> using martial-arts tropes, with the Iranians as anthropomorphized cats and Trump as an eagle-headed grand master unleashing expensive golden bombs. The X account of the Iranian Embassy in the Hague posted an A.I. animation<\/a> depicting Trump\u2019s internal monologue as an \u201cInside Out\u201d-esque hive of demons, and the account of the Iranian Embassy in South Africa posted a slop video that referenced a famous COVID-era TikTok, of a man longboarding to Fleetwood Mac, to celebrate Iran\u2019s bombing of Tel Aviv<\/a>. But Explosive News\u2019 videos might be the world\u2019s most potent example of slopaganda yet, changing hearts and minds\u2014or at least generating lots of clicks\u2014one exploding toy battleship at a time.<\/p>\n Last weekend, YouTube and Instagram abruptly took Explosive News\u2019 accounts down. Instagram did not respond to a request for comment, but a spokesperson for YouTube said that it had removed the channel for \u201cviolating our Spam, deceptive practices and scams policies.\u201d (The Explosive News representative blamed the ban on \u201c\u00a0\u2018false flag\u2019 media actions\u201d by \u201cZionist actors.\u201d) But the videos remain accessible on X and other platforms, and the removals seem to have done little to slow their reach. The representative said that at first the team was surprised by their international notoriety, because they\u2019d aimed their content squarely at Iranian viewers, but that they\u2019ve begun to mold the videos to a wider audience as they \u201cbetter understand their preferences.\u201d Last week, their channel on Telegram began posting in English instead of in Persian, and the group broadened its name from Explosive News to Explosive Media. This Tuesday, they posted a teaser on X<\/a> for a new video featuring bombs falling over burning bald eagles and a Lego Moses watching the conflagration of a pyramid etched with Trump\u2019s face. In the current geopolitical climate, perhaps slopaganda is just another path to global-media stardom. \u201cWe\u2019re dreaming bigger,\u201d the representative said. \u201cNew formats, cinematic vibes, maybe even longer works. Who knows?\u201d\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Explosive News posted its first Lego-style videos during the U.S. and Israel\u2019s bombing campaign on Iranian nuclear facilities…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":54406,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[6050],"tags":[30135,2271,4248,6051,3790],"class_list":["post-54405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-lego","tag-artificial-intelligence-a-i","tag-iran","tag-lego","tag-lego-group","tag-youtube"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@dk\/116337684435851416","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54405\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}