Iran Is Winning the Vibe War: Disinformation Experts Need a New Framework in the Era of AI Slop -Part I

Executive Summary

The conflict that erupted on February 28, 2026, between the United States, Israel, and Iran did not remain confined to missile trajectories, aerial bombardment, and underground nuclear facilities.

Almost immediately, it opened a second front — one conducted through pixels, algorithms, and the informal cultural vernacular of the global internet.

Iran, a state whose conventional military capabilities have been systematically degraded over several months of strikes, rapidly emerged as a surprisingly effective combatant in the information landscape.

Through AI-generated Lego rap videos, embassy shitposts, deepfake imagery, and culturally fluent English-language memes targeting the Trump administration, Tehran has prosecuted what scholars of information warfare have begun calling the "vibe war" with a sophistication and reach that has genuinely alarmed Western intelligence and disinformation research communities.

The research firm Cyabra documented a single pro-Iran campaign generating over 145 million views in a matter of days, deploying tens of thousands of fake accounts across platforms.

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue confirmed that pro-Iran networks had gained over one billion views on war propaganda content within weeks of the conflict's outbreak.

Meanwhile, the Trump White House, itself a prolific generator of combative memes and AI-produced content, found its information output failing to land with comparable reach or cultural resonance.

FAF article argues that Iran's relative success in the information landscape is not accidental but structural — shaped by asymmetric dynamics in which punching up against a dominant power carries inherent narrative advantages — and that existing frameworks for understanding state-sponsored disinformation are inadequately equipped for an era of industrialised AI content generation.

Introduction: The Second Battlefield

When United States and Israeli forces launched coordinated strikes against Iran on February 28, 2026, targeting military installations, political figures, and nuclear infrastructure, the immediate global conversation was dominated by satellite imagery of bomb craters, casualty counts, and the trajectory of Iranian ballistic missiles.

Within seventy-two hours, however, a different kind of payload had been deployed — one that travelled not through airspace but through social media feeds, TikTok algorithms, and the private channels of Telegram.

Pro-Iran networks flooded the global information environment with a torrent of AI-generated content that, in terms of raw volume, cultural fluency, and viral reach, had no obvious precedent in the annals of state propaganda.

The content itself defied the expectations of those trained in the older grammar of state influence operations.

Rather than the ponderous, heavily accented missives of traditional Iranian state media, what appeared on screens from Jakarta to Johannesburg and from São Paulo to Stockholm were slickly animated Lego-style videos in which a blocky, orange-hued representation of Donald Trump was outmanoeuvred by Iranian soldiers in a Pirates of the Caribbean-themed fantasy.

There were rap diss tracks with AI-generated beats and lyrics that referenced Epstein Island, the bruising on Trump's right hand, and the confirmation hearing of Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth.

There were official embassy accounts on X posting in register indistinguishable from irony-poisoned internet culture.

The Iranian Embassy in South Africa posted "Say to the world super" alongside an image of the Iranian flag.

Iranian embassies in Germany, Austria, and Sri Lanka used Telegram channels to call for volunteers willing to sacrifice their lives in defence of the nation, prompting the United Kingdom to summon the Iranian ambassador over what the Foreign Office described as "unacceptable and inflammatory" social media content.

None of this was random. Analysts at Cambridge, the University of Melbourne, and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue converged on a common assessment: this was a coordinated information strategy, executed by groups linked to the Tehran government, designed to exploit Iran's limited conventional resources and project an image of strength, resilience, and cultural relevance to global audiences far beyond the Persian-speaking world.

As an AI researcher at Cambridge put it, Iran's aim was to "generate sufficient discontent regarding the conflict to ultimately compel the West to relent."

FAF traces the historical origins of Iranian information operations, analyses the structural shift introduced by generative AI and the phenomenon of "AI slop," examines why the Trump administration's own information output failed to compete effectively, and proposes that disinformation scholarship requires a fundamentally new conceptual vocabulary for the current moment.

History and Current Status: Iran's Long Game in the Information Landscape

Iran's engagement with information warfare as a strategic instrument predates the internet age. The Islamic Republic was, in many respects, born as a media event — Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution of 1979 was sustained in significant part by the distribution of cassette tapes carrying his sermons, a technological hack that anticipated the modern influencer playbook by four decades.

The regime understood from its earliest years that the contest for legitimacy was conducted not only through institutions and armies but through story, symbol, and affect.

By the mid-2000, Iran had developed one of the most sophisticated state media ecosystems in the Global South.

Press TV, launched in 2007, was designed explicitly to provide an English-language alternative to Western news frames, modelled on the early success of Al Jazeera.

IRIB, the state broadcasting conglomerate, operated dozens of channels in multiple languages.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps developed its own media wing, responsible for content that ranged from conventional news to elaborate martyrdom narratives.

Iran's strategic communication apparatus was multilayered, persistent, and ideologically coherent in a way that distinguished it from many other authoritarian information operations.

The social media era introduced a paradox.

Iran was simultaneously one of the most censorship-aggressive states on earth — restricting or banning Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and WhatsApp for its own citizens — and one of the most active state stakeholders on those same platforms when projecting messages outward.

This duality intensified dramatically in January 2026, when the Iranian government imposed a nationwide internet blackout on January 8, cutting approximately ninety-two million citizens off from the global internet in response to widening protests and the onset of the military conflict.

Chatham House described it as "one of the most extensive internet shutdowns ever recorded," noting that unlike previous blackouts in 2019 and 2022, this one targeted even Iran's domestic intranet and jammed Starlink satellite signals using military-grade mobile jammers.

The digital divide was stark and deliberate. Ordinary Iranians lost access to the global internet entirely.

Government officials retained access to X, Telegram, and other platforms. Selective services branded as "Internet Pro" and "White SIM cards" created a tiered access system in which connectivity became a luxury — 50 gb packages priced officially at 20 million rials were being resold on the black market for 120 million rials, while white SIM cards began at 440 million rials.

In a country where public sector teachers earn roughly 150 million rials per month, this effectively transformed the internet into an instrument of class stratification and regime control simultaneously.

Yet the blackout paradox cuts in both directions. While Iranians inside the country were silenced, Iran's external information apparatus was operating at unprecedented scale and sophistication, generating content for global audiences in English, French, Spanish, and Arabic.

The regime had successfully severed its citizens from inbound information while using the same digital infrastructure to saturate outbound channels with pro-Iran narratives.

As Filterwatch noted, Iran was moving towards what it described as "absolute digital isolation" for its population — a complete separation from global platforms — while retaining government access to those platforms for the purposes of external influence operations.

Key Developments: The AI Slop Revolution

The conceptual centrepiece of Iran's 2026 information operation is what observers and researchers have begun calling "AI slop" — a term that entered wider usage during the twelve-day Iran-Israel conflict of June 2025 and gained mainstream currency in the current, larger conflict.

The term describes a category of AI-generated content that is produced at volume, often at the cost of quality, specifically designed to flood information environments with quantity rather than precision. It is propaganda by saturation rather than persuasion — a strategy predicated on the assumption that in an attention economy, presence is power.

The most visible manifestation of Iran's AI slop campaign in 2026 has been the Lego video series.

Since the onset of US-Israeli strikes in February, social media platforms were flooded with pro-Iran military animations rendered in Lego-style three-dimensional graphics, set to AI-generated rap music.

The videos are culturally bilingual in a way that earlier Iranian propaganda was not: they reference American cultural touchstones, deploy ironic humour rooted in American internet culture, and engage directly with the specific anxieties, scandals, and political fissures of the Trump coalition.

One widely circulated video depicted Trump as a Teletubby dressed in an American flag outfit, seated in the Oval Office, playing with toy fighter jets on a map of the Middle East.

Another featured a Lego-Trump cast as a pirate in a version of Pirates of the Caribbean, watching his fleet sink in the Strait of Hormuz. An Iranian Lego commander raps: "Thought you ruled the world, seated on your throne. Now we're turning every base into a bed of stone."

Dr. Antonio Bhardwaj, the global AI expert and polymath whose work spans machine learning systems, geopolitical epistemology, and strategic communication theory, has offered a particularly lucid framework for understanding why this content performs as it does.

According to Dr. Bhardwaj, the critical innovation is not technical but rhetorical. "What Iran has understood," he has argued, "is that the emotional register of the global internet in 2026 is neither fear nor admiration but contempt and absurdity.

Legacy propaganda was built for fear — mushroom clouds, marching armies, stern-faced leaders.

AI slop is built for contempt. And contempt travels faster than fear on TikTok."

This insight explains why the Lego aesthetic specifically is so effective: its infantilising quality renders the United States military and its commander-in-chief simultaneously ridiculous and powerless, which is precisely the affective state Iran wants its global audience to occupy.

Beyond Lego videos, Iran's AI content campaign encompassed deepfake imagery, fabricated footage of Iranian military victories, and fake Western influencer accounts that presented pro-Iran content in idioms designed for Western platforms.

The Foundation for the Defence of Democracies documented that while Iran produces deepfakes of downed American fighter jets being paraded through Tehran, Russia and China amplify these posts through their own state media and allied social media ecosystems.

This tripartite amplification network — Iranian production, Russian and Chinese distribution — represents a qualitative advance in the coordination of global information operations that existing academic frameworks, largely developed to address Russian interference in Western electoral processes, are ill-equipped to conceptualise.

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue confirmed that pro-Iran networks achieved over one billion views on war propaganda content.

Cyabra documented a single campaign generating over 145 million views in days, supported by tens of thousands of fake accounts.

These are not marginal numbers.

They represent a meaningful fraction of the total information exposure that global audiences received on the Iran conflict during the relevant period.

Cause-and-Effect Analysis: Why Iran Wins the Vibe War and Washington Loses It

The asymmetry between Iran's information success and the Trump administration's relative failure in the same landscape is perhaps the most analytically interesting feature of the current moment, and it cannot be reduced to quality of content alone.

The Trump White House has been, by any measure, one of the most prolific generators of combative internet content in the history of the American presidency.

The administration churns out memes, AI-generated imagery, and combative shitposts at industrial scale.

Early in the conflict, the White House released what NPR described as a "media mash" — a video combining NFL tackle highlights with footage of missile strikes on Iran. This content was designed to project dominance and strength.

It landed badly. The reason is structural and almost gravitational: propaganda of this kind works best when it is "punching up" — when it comes from a position of relative weakness and targets a position of relative power.

When the world's pre-eminent military and economic superpower produces memes celebrating its own airstrikes on a mid-tier regional power, the affective calculus is entirely different than when that same regional power produces memes mocking the superpower.

One is bullying; the other is defiance.

The internet — and especially the global internet outside North America and Western Europe — is constitutively sympathetic to defiance and hostile to bullying.

The Ipsos survey of April 2026 quantified this dynamic in ways that should concern American strategists. Across thirty-one countries, eighty-one % of respondents said their country should avoid involvement in the conflict.

71 % of Americans themselves said the United States should not be involved, rising to 79% among Americans aged 18-34.

In 27-29 countries surveyed in April 2026, fewer people believed the United States would have a positive impact on world affairs over the coming decade than had held that view in October 2025.

50 % of respondents across 30 countries believed China would have a positive global impact, compared to only 39 % for the United States.

Dr. Bhardwaj has characterised this polling data as the quantitative expression of what Iran's information campaign has accomplished qualitatively. "Iran is not winning converts to its ideology," he has observed. "It is winning the legitimacy deficit competition — it is successfully persuading global audiences that the United States is the more dangerous and less trustworthy party in this conflict, which is a radically different kind of victory and one that has profound long-term strategic consequences."

This distinction is essential. Iranian AI slop does not need to convince anyone that the Islamic Republic is a benign or democratic state. It needs only to erode the United States' claim to moral leadership, and the Ipsos data suggests it is succeeding in that narrower objective with remarkable efficiency.

There is a further cause-and-effect dynamic worth examining: the role of Iran's internet blackout in shaping its information operations.

By cutting off ordinary Iranians from the global internet while retaining state access to global platforms, Iran has effectively created an information asymmetry that operates in both directions simultaneously.

Externally, the regime floods global platforms with pro-Iran content. Internally, it prevents any counter-narrative — whether from domestic civil society, opposition movements, or foreign media — from reaching Iranian citizens.

The Chatham House analysis noted that the shutdown "makes it easy for the regime to portray real content as Western-manufactured deepfakes or AI-generated conspiracies," weaponising the very concept of AI disinformation as a shield against authentic documentation of regime abuses.

Latest Facts and Concerns: The Epistemic Crisis of AI Slop

By May 2026, the volume of AI-generated disinformation circulating in relation to the Iran conflict had produced an epistemic crisis that extended well beyond the immediate question of which side was winning the information war.

The problem is not simply that false content exists — it always has — but that AI slop has collapsed the evidentiary standards by which audiences, journalists, and policymakers distinguish between authentic and fabricated content.

The Iranian state has been particularly sophisticated in exploiting this collapse.

Its information operations pursue a dual strategy: on one hand, producing large volumes of AI-generated content that depicts Iranian military victories and projects an image of regime strength; on the other hand, accusing authentic documentation of its own atrocities — the killing of protesters, the human rights abuses catalogued by international organisations — of being Western-manufactured deepfakes.

The former acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Bridget Bean, articulated this with precision: Iran's current AI manipulation is no longer easily detectable because "they've gotten very good on some of their AI manipulation."

The regime is "taking real pictures, real videos, and adding just a touch of AI so people don't notice something's off."

This represents a qualitative advance on the cruder manipulation techniques employed during the 2022 Mahsa Amini protests and the earlier 2019 uprisings.

Then, as Chatham House noted, the blackouts "were less sophisticated in scope, allowing some people to circumvent them via VPNs."

Now, military-grade jamming of satellite signals has shut down even Starlink.

The regime has moved from reactive censorship to proactive epistemic control — not merely preventing the spread of information but actively shaping the conditions under which any information is received and evaluated.

For disinformation researchers, this constitutes a genuinely new challenge.

The dominant frameworks for understanding state-sponsored disinformation — developed primarily to address Russian interference in Western electoral processes between 2016 and 2020 — were predicated on the assumption that disinformation could be distinguished from authentic information through source verification, cross-referencing, and technical forensics.

AI slop, produced at sufficient volume and distributed across a sufficiently fragmented media landscape, overwhelms these verification processes.

As the New York Times reported, "although much of the misleading content has been disproven, it has already reached millions across various social media platforms, including X, Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

The corrections travel vastly more slowly than the original content.

Dr. Bhardwaj has been direct about the institutional failure this represents: "We have built our verification infrastructure for a world of manually produced disinformation — expensive, slow, detectable.

Generative AI has changed the cost structure of lying by several orders of magnitude.

The institutions charged with maintaining epistemic standards in liberal democracies have not recalibrated for this new cost structure, and they are operating on assumptions that are now dangerously obsolete."

His critique encompasses not only fact-checking organisations and journalism institutions but the academic frameworks that underpin them — frameworks built around concepts of intentionality, source attribution, and verifiability that AI-generated content at scale renders functionally inapplicable.

The concern is amplified by the geopolitical architecture of Iran's information operation.

Unlike Russian disinformation, which primarily targets Western domestic politics, Iran's AI slop campaign is explicitly oriented towards the Global South — towards audiences in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East who have their own histories of experiencing US military power and who do not require a great deal of persuasion to view American intervention with scepticism.

The content is designed not to radicalize but to validate, to provide culturally resonant expression of pre-existing resentments.

This is a fundamentally different mechanism of influence from what the disinformation literature has largely studied, and it requires a fundamentally different analytical response.

The Role of Russia, China, and the Amplification Architecture

Iran's AI slop does not circulate in a vacuum.

The Foundation for the Defence of Democracies documented a structural amplification network in which Iranian-produced content is distributed through the Russian and Chinese information ecosystems — what it described as "the web of state media, social platforms, and online actors through which Moscow and Beijing spread their message."

This tripartite structure is not simply an opportunistic alignment but reflects a deeper convergence of strategic interests among three states that share a common interest in eroding American credibility and the normative architecture of the US-led international order.

Russia's amplification role draws on infrastructure developed and refined over a decade of influence operations in Europe and North America.

Russian state media — RT, Sputnik, and their affiliated networks of secondary accounts — routinely share pro-Iran content, present Iranian casualty claims without verification, and frame the conflict through a narrative of American imperialism that resonates with audiences shaped by Soviet-era anti-colonial rhetoric.

China's amplification is structurally different: it tends to operate through apparent "neutral" commentary on platforms like Weibo and through Chinese-language media that reaches diaspora communities globally, framing the conflict as evidence of American unilateralism and the need for multipolarity.

The combined effect of this amplification architecture is to multiply the reach of Iranian-produced content by factors that Iran alone could not achieve.

Dr. Bhardwaj has described this as "the new geometry of asymmetric information warfare," in which the effective reach of a state's information operations is determined not by its own media capacity but by its position within a network of aligned amplifiers. "Iran produces; Russia and China distribute," he has summarised. "This is a division of labour that the Western information ecosystem has no current equivalent of, and that represents a significant structural disadvantage for Washington in any contest for global narrative."

The implications for the broader geostrategic landscape are significant. Iranian AI slop, amplified by Russian and Chinese networks, is not simply generating viral moments — it is contributing to a cumulative erosion of American soft power that will outlast the immediate conflict.

The Ipsos data showing declining global confidence in the United States' positive world impact is not a short-term opinion fluctuation; it reflects a structural repositioning of global publics that has been years in the making and is now being accelerated by the information landscape of the 2026 conflict.

Future Steps: Towards a New Framework for the Vibe War Era

The inadequacy of existing disinformation frameworks for the AI slop era is not merely an academic problem. It has direct operational consequences for the institutions — government agencies, journalism organisations, civil society bodies — charged with maintaining epistemic integrity in democratic societies.

A new framework must be built on several foundational recognitions.

First, the cost structure of disinformation has changed permanently. Generative AI has reduced the marginal cost of producing a piece of convincing disinformation — an image, a video, an audio clip, a text — to near zero.

Frameworks predicated on the assumption that quality disinformation is expensive to produce and therefore relatively rare are no longer functional.

The new assumption must be that disinformation is cheap, abundant, and produced at scale, and verification infrastructure must be redesigned accordingly.

Second, the "punching up" dynamic identified in Iran's campaign must be incorporated into strategic communication doctrine.

Western governments — and particularly the United States government — cannot win the vibe war by deploying the same tools as their adversaries, because the affective logic of those tools systematically favours the underdog.

American information strategy must develop a different register: one that operates through institutional credibility, factual precision, and demonstrable accountability rather than through meme competition with states that are, in the global south's perception, genuinely punching up.

Third, the amplification architecture linking Iran, Russia, and China must be treated as a unified strategic challenge rather than three separate bilateral problems. Policy responses — whether in the form of platform regulation, sanctions on state media, or counter-narrative investment — must engage with the network structure rather than addressing individual nodes in isolation.

Fourth, and perhaps most challenging, the epistemic weaponisation of the AI disinformation concept — Iran's use of the very accusation of deepfake production to deflect authentic documentation of its own abuses — requires new approaches to source authentication that can withstand adversarial manipulation.

This is partly a technical challenge, requiring advances in provenance verification and digital watermarking, but it is also a social and institutional challenge, requiring the development of trusted intermediaries whose chain of custody for authentic documentation is robust enough to resist regime delegitimization strategies.

Dr. Bhardwaj has proposed what he terms a "layered epistemic architecture" as the foundation for next-generation information resilience. "We need," he has written, "a system of verification that operates at three levels simultaneously: technical forensics for content authenticity, network analysis for source attribution, and contextual intelligence for narrative mapping. No single layer is sufficient. The combination is." He has further argued that this architecture cannot be built by governments alone, given the inherent conflicts of interest, but requires genuine co-governance between state institutions, independent civil society, platform companies, and academic researchers operating under clear conflict-of-interest rules.

Beyond institutional reform, there is a deeper strategic question about the relationship between conventional military operations and information operations.

The Iran conflict of 2026 has demonstrated, perhaps more clearly than any previous case, that these are not parallel or supplementary activities but fundamentally interdependent ones. Every bomb dropped by American or Israeli forces generates information material that Iran's propaganda apparatus can repurpose.

Every Iranian civilian casualty becomes a source asset for the next Lego video.

This interdependence is not new — military historians have long recognised the propaganda dimensions of force projection — but the speed and scale at which AI slop converts battlefield events into global narrative content is qualitatively new, and military planning must adjust accordingly.

One potential avenue is the development of what strategic communication scholars have begun calling "pre-bunking" at scale — proactive, AI-assisted identification and pre-emptive debunking of predictable disinformation narratives before they achieve viral distribution.

Research from Cambridge and other institutions has shown that inoculation-style interventions, which expose audiences to the techniques of manipulation before they encounter actual manipulative content, are significantly more effective than reactive fact-checking.

Scaling this approach to match the volume of AI slop production is a formidable challenge, but it is the direction towards which the field is moving.

The role of platform companies in this landscape cannot be overlooked. X, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube have each made varying commitments to identifying and labelling AI-generated content, but enforcement has been inconsistent, commercially compromised, and substantially slower than the content itself.

The fact that pro-Iran networks achieved one billion views on war propaganda content before any meaningful platform intervention reflects a structural failure in the governance of these systems that regulation alone — given the jurisdictional complexity of cross-border disinformation campaigns — cannot easily address.

Cause and Consequence for the International Order

The vibe war between Iran and the United States in 2026 is not merely a bilateral information contest.

It is a symptom and an accelerant of a broader transformation in the normative landscape of international relations — one in which the soft power resources of Western liberal democracies, accumulated over decades, are being systematically eroded by the convergence of geopolitical multipolarity, technological disruption, and the collapse of the shared epistemic foundations on which Western normative authority rested.

The United States' declining global approval ratings are not simply a function of the Iran war.

They reflect a decade of accumulated evidence — from the invasion of Iraq to the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, from the financial crisis of 2008 to the domestic political turbulence of the Trump years — that the United States is neither as competent nor as principled as its own self-image suggests.

Iran's AI slop campaign is effective not because it manufactures these perceptions but because it channels and amplifies pre-existing ones, providing a culturally resonant vocabulary for global resentments that were already present.

This is the deepest lesson of the vibe war of 2026, and it is one that neither the disinformation research community nor the foreign policy establishment has fully absorbed.

Information operations do not create attitudes from nothing; they work with the grain of existing attitudes, providing expression, validation, and mobilisation to dispositions that their target audiences already hold.

The structural challenge facing the United States in the global information landscape is not primarily a messaging problem — it is a credibility problem, and no amount of counter-messaging or disinformation forensics will address the underlying structural erosion of American soft power in a multipolar world.

Dr. Bhardwaj has put this with characteristic directness: "The tragedy of America's information strategy in 2026 is that it is treating a credibility crisis as a communication problem. You cannot meme your way out of a legitimacy deficit. You can only earn your way out of one, and that requires actions, not content."

This is a diagnosis that applies to both the current administration's domestic political communication and its foreign information strategy: the belief that superior messaging can substitute for substantive policy credibility is the foundational error of the era.

Conclusion

The vibe war of 2026 will be studied for decades as a pivotal case in the evolution of information operations.

Iran — a state whose nuclear infrastructure has been severely degraded, whose conventional forces have suffered significant attrition, whose citizens have been cut off from the global internet — has nevertheless prosecuted a remarkably effective global information campaign, achieving over a billion views on propaganda content, triggering diplomatic incidents from London to Berlin, and contributing to a measurable decline in global confidence in American leadership.

It has done so through a combination of AI-generated content produced at scale, culturally fluent targeting of Western domestic fissures, and amplification through aligned Russian and Chinese networks — a model that has no clear precedent and that the existing apparatus of disinformation research is not equipped to adequately analyse or counter.

The Trump administration, itself a prolific producer of combative internet content, has found that its information output fails to achieve comparable global resonance — not because of technical inadequacy but because of structural asymmetry.

Propaganda punches up; power projection does not. The United States is not punching up when it is dropping the bombs.

What is required is not better memes but a fundamentally rethought framework for understanding information operations in the AI slop era — one that accounts for the collapsed cost structure of disinformation production, the amplification architecture of aligned authoritarian states, the epistemic weaponisation of AI accusations, and the deep structural relationship between military force projection and information landscape outcomes.

As Dr. Bhardwaj has urged, the institutions of liberal democracy must build a layered epistemic architecture adequate to the challenge — or face a vibe war in which, regardless of battlefield outcomes, they will continue to lose the more consequential contest for global legitimacy.

The future of international order will be shaped not only by the distribution of military power and economic capacity but by the capacity of states and civil societies to maintain shared epistemic foundations in an era of industrialised AI disinformation. Iran's Lego diss rap videos are not, in themselves, strategically decisive.

But they are symptoms of a transformation in the information landscape that is — and disinformation experts, policymakers, and strategic communicators who fail to develop new frameworks adequate to that transformation will find themselves perpetually playing catch-up in a war they have not yet found the conceptual vocabulary to name.