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The Team Behind a Pro-Iran, Lego-Themed Viral-Video Campaign

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/the-team-behind-a-pro-iran-lego-themed-viral-video-campaign
54•tantalor•1h ago

Comments

tantalor•1h ago
https://archive.is/73hcR
virgildotcodes•1h ago
It was quite obvious, but this is a noteworthy example of just how much more effective propaganda will become with AI.

These videos are blowing up on Twitter.

I personally found the one about Pete Hegseth quite well made and the song actually catchy.

abdusco•1h ago
Care to share the link?
mirashii•59m ago
https://mastodon.social/@blogdiva/116348872322024778
blackcatsec•41m ago
people were worried about deepfakes with AI but instead the propaganda is doing pretty well, and arguably better, when it's not a deepfake but instead silly, catchy, youthful, and is playing up existing beliefs. The invasion is deeply unpopular in the US, and these videos only serve to amp that up.
baggy_trough•34m ago
Invasion?
chaostheory•28m ago
Ground troops are going to be deployed
baggy_trough•7m ago
That would be a precondition, yes.
simonw•31m ago
That Hegseth one is an extraordinary piece of media. It's dense with Hegseth and Epstein lore, the song is catchy, the visuals are a significant cut above the normal AI slop aesthetic.

If this is Iranian state backed propaganda (which seems very likely) it's light years ahead of those White House videos with footage of bombs mixed in with clips from action movies.

guzfip•16m ago
The White House seems to have made the mistake of hiring HOI4 modders for their propaganda team.
input_sh•53m ago
Given the headline, they found out nothing about "the team".
hk1337•35m ago
Siding with a dictatorial regime that’s murdered 100s of their own people and aided terrorist organizations because you both hate the same person is absurd.
imdsm•32m ago
I watched "One Battle After Another" and it shows how deranged people are. I don't think its a new thing, I just think in any stable society, people who don't thrive eventually find a way to destroy the society in the hope whatever comes next will serve them better. In a society where hard work and intelligent gives you an advantage, it stands to reason that lazy, stupid people will need to play differently in order to win.

I can't wait to read wikipedia in 30 years.

fcarraldo•27m ago
I'm sorry, your takeaway from that film was that Sean Penn was the good guy?
delis-thumbs-7e•8m ago
> In a society where hard work and intelligent gives you an advantage

Which society is this, Sweden? Xi Jinping is pretty smart and hard working, is China being demolished by lazy dumb twats? Because it seems to me its US that is overrun bu stupidity and sheer lazyness right now, but it seems to be because it rewards people like Musk, Trump etc.

lynndotpy•4m ago
Isn't the film fiction? I haven't seen it but I would refrain from using a fiction film as something to measure "how deranged people are" by.
cryptoegorophy•30m ago
Today’s world is messed up. Look at EU leaders rubbing shoulders with Syrian president/ex-terrorist.
glawre•25m ago
Don't forget Trump rubbing shoulders with al-Sharaa either.
the_duke•25m ago
That's in part because many EU countries would like to ship the Syrian refugees back to Syria.
lenerdenator•24m ago
Today's?

We were shuffling capital to China after Tiananmen Square. People were talking about how we should have left Saddam alone because of how "orderly" Iraq was under his boot. Europeans were happy to ink the plans for Nordstream 2 after Russia sent tanks into Georgia, and Russia received no less than a FIFA World Cup and Olympic games after seizing Crimea.

There is incredibly little will to stick to the whole "humans have rights and we should have a rules-based international order" when the rubber meets the road.

acessoproibido•17m ago
rules-based international order is mostly a propaganda term that the Us empire invented. It also was mostly "rules for thee but not for me"

Its a nice thing in theory but in practice power always overruled morals and I think the current US admin not only freely admits this but also kind of rubs your nose in it. In a way its less hypocritical than previously but also incredibly sobering for someone who grew up in a seemingly more "stable" world

lenerdenator•4m ago
> rules-based international order is mostly a propaganda term that the Us empire invented. It also was mostly "rules for thee but not for me"

I think there was an effort to try to stick to it, at least early on after WWII when people had seen what the old system resulted in.

Then the Berlin blockade, Korea, and Hungarian intervention happened and the implication was made that the rules were what were to be aspired to, not actually followed, and it's been all downhill from there.

Incidentally, most of those aren't on the "Us empire".

u8080•13m ago
Indeed, we even had deals with Germany and Belgium who bombed hospitals in Yugoslavia in 1999!
lenerdenator•29m ago
There's an implicit tolerance of authoritarian regimes so long as the price is right. This is nothing new.
raincole•26m ago
Which one? If you mean Iran, "100s of" seems like a weird understatement.
throwuxiytayq•23m ago
The number is well in the thousands/tens of thousands, and we have no way of knowing precisely because, well, it's a dictatorial regime.
josefritzishere•21m ago
I appreciate that this statement accurately describes all three regimes primarily involved without naming one.
prh8•20m ago
What about the dictatorial regime that's bombing schools, falsely imprisoned tens of thousands, murdered far more than 100s, openly admitting to international war crimes?
titanomachy•15m ago
You probably have to wait 2 more years to see if they're really a dictatorship, for the time being at least they still have an electoral mandate.
edgyquant•14m ago
Who exactly are you talking about?
barbazoo•8m ago
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blam...

> On the first morning of Operation Epic Fury, 28 February 2026, American forces struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab, in southern Iran, hitting the building at least two times during the morning session. American forces killed between 175 and 180 people, most of them girls between the ages of seven and 12

dmos62•12m ago
It's almost funny how both of these descriptions can apply to either country.
platinumrad•18m ago
I agree with you on principle, but you're oversimplifying things if you think that opposition to the United States or Israel is all about a single person.
jdthedisciple•15m ago
So instead we must side with another regime that slaughtered 72'000 innocent civilians of another country, most of whom were women and children?
praptak•14m ago
A regime driven by a weird religious cult and murdering their own citizens is battling a regime which is driven by a weird religious cult and is murdering their own citizens.

I think in this situation it is okay to cheer on both sides.

alberto-m•12m ago
Churchill and Eisenhower beg to disagree. When everyone is bad, you focus on restraining the most powerful actor first.
barbazoo•11m ago
Check out the history behind this and how the US has treated Iran because of their Oil for almost a hundred years now. This is 100% on the west in my opinion. We've been abusing these people for the longest time.
cobbzilla•3m ago
Before the US it was the British with BP.

Before the British with BP it was the British East India Company.

Before the British EIC there were various periods of Arab, Turk and Mongol control.

Persia has been a political football since Alexander the Great. Cursed geography.

pasquinelli•5m ago
i really can't tell which side you're talking about
chaostheory•34m ago
No one cares about who made these videos in the US. The bigger issue is why are we engaging in a ground war in Iran when it doesn’t really serve US interests? Everyone on both political spectrums in the US can see why it benefits Saudi Arabia and Israel, but not the US.

We’re using precious resources like missiles that we will need in the Pacific theater in next 1-2 years

harrall•4m ago
Because it wasn’t planned that far. The administration probably thought it would go like Venezuela.

A second problem is that we knew for a while that we were weak at asymmetric warfare but we didn’t fix it because we had big ongoing contracts for big ships.

There are US defense companies that actually specialize in that but they weren’t given the same attention (but boy are they now).

dvh•34m ago
I'm much more impressed by Chinese state-made eagles vs. cats video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dGY0_pgkv8
KellyCriterion•31m ago
Is this one group?

Today I saw an analyst from Pakistan and he also had some of these "trump-lego-snippets" in the video, was wondering why someone would put so much effort in a video against trump, but it seems he copied it somewhere (from this group e.g.)

dbvn•30m ago
Hate to admit it... but the video goes hard
josefritzishere•23m ago
The production values were great. I can't deny it.
sschueller•7m ago
I would be interested to know how these are made on a technical level. Is it a combination of several tools and are they local or some service (I would think LEGO minifigs would trigger some copyright issue)? I also assume you need to do certain things to keep the consistency and somehow sync the music with the video?

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https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/2041133254586122605
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