TRAPPED IN LIES 🔥🔥🔥 LEGO Drill StoryGoes Viral ‪@militarylegoai‬ #iran #lego #trending #usa

 TRAPPED IN LIES 🔥🔥🔥 LEGO Drill StoryGoes Viral ‪@militarylegoai‬ #iran #lego #trending #usa

Iranians Are Stuck in the Middle of an Information War

On the first day of Trump’s Operation Epic Fury against Iran, the United States military struck a school in the south of the country multiple times, reportedly killing at least 175 people, mostly young children.

“I swear, it was the government that hit the school,” Alireza, my 33-year-old relative, insisted in an Instagram voice message to me. He claimed that Iran’s own armed forces had struck the Minab school. I shared multiple Western media sources and investigations revealing that American Tomahawk missiles had inflicted the damage. Where did Alireza, living in Iran, attain such misinformation, and why was he adamant about his position, even after the Pentagon tacitly admitted fault?

In Iran’s hyper-polarized society, events like the Minab tragedy spawn conspiracies, suspicions, and outright denials of reality rather than shared moments for mourning. Everything is part of a struggle for narrative control of this war. Nuance be damned. The result is bitter ruptures among Iranians inside and outside of the country as we reckon with the unrest and transformation of our besieged, beloved homeland.

The Iranian government tightly controls media inside the country. This isolation is entrenched by international sanctions, which deprive ordinary citizens from accessing the world. Persian-language media based outside of Iran have filled this vacuum—and they have their own motivations and state funding sources.

In the past decade, Iran International and Manoto, two London-based channels with mysterious origins and a clear anti-Islamic Republic editorial direction, have become the de facto sources of information for millions of Iranians. Both promote the son of Iran’s deposed last king, Reza Pahlavi, as the head of an inevitable government-in-waiting. Iran International received an initial investment of $250 million from the Saudi Arabian crown prince; Manoto’s funding comes from private venture capital sources with cultural ties to Israel and fondness for the Pahlavis. Pahlavi has also received support from Israel in the form of a reported cyber campaign that created automated bot followers and fake engagement with his social media posts.

On the algorithmic battlefront, Iranian state television and media (and other accounts sympathetic to the current government such as the media collective Explosive News) have set a new standard for 21st-century AI agitprop with offerings ranging from Lego rap videos to AI-generated film trailers, all supporting a narrative of this war as an American strategic blunder and distraction from the Epstein files. Through statements on X, Iranian officials are hoping to influence panic in the oil markets and exploit Trump’s lack of cohesive messaging about this war by, well, trolling him. Official Chinese accounts have waded in. For a brief while, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was unable to disprove convincingly an internet theory that he was dead.

We are now in a new era in which the digital world increasingly determines the analog one instead of vice versa. Donald Trump claims that Iran is a master manipulator in this kind of warfare, even as he excels at it too, timing Truth Social statements with the opening and closing of financial markets. All of this makes the intelligibility of this war an example of contemporary warfare itself. Narratives, economies, and geopolitics move in lockstep.