On Sunday, April 5, U.S. President Donald Trump posted a reminder of his thrice-postponed deadline for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or face U.S. strikes on its civilian infrastructure, such as power plants and bridges—a threat that he escalated two days later by saying Iran’s “whole civilization will die tonight,” hours before abruptly announcing a two-week cease-fire.

That deadline, as Trump posted on his social media platform Truth Social on Sunday, was “Tuesday, 8:00 P.M. Eastern Time!”

One of the more unexpected responses to that post came from the X account of the Iranian Embassy in Zimbabwe. “8 P.M. is not that good. Could you change it to between 1 and 2 P.M., or if possible, 1 and 2 A.M.? Thank you for your attention to this important matter. I.E.Z.,” the embassy wrote, paraphrasing in its last sentence a phrase that Trump frequently uses to sign off his posts.

It was a public diplomatic communication that would likely have been unthinkable even six weeks ago and a remarkably tongue-in-cheek response from a country that had just faced a month of relentless bombing by the United States and Israel.

But various Iranian embassy accounts have spent much of the war trolling Trump and his administration with posts, photos, and videos, some of which are generated by artificial intelligence.

“Back to the Stone Age already? We’ve been a civilization for thousands of years,” the Iranian Embassy in Thailand posted in response to Trump’s threat to blast Iran “back to the Stone Ages.” The post featured an AI-generated photo depicting the U.S. president as a caveman.

“The regime change happened successfully,” the Iranian Embassy in South Africa wrote, mentioning one of Trump’s many given reasons for launching the war against Iran but juxtaposing it with photos with overlays crossing out several military officials recently fired by U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

One might be forgiven for thinking that these were parody accounts, as none of them have the gray check mark that X often places on official government accounts. But an Iranian official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the media confirmed that all three accounts were authentic and belonged to the embassies, adding that they “post on X on their own initiative and independently.”

The Iranian Embassy in India—which is officially verified by Twitter—posted an AI-generated image of Trump kneeling before a sculpture of a horseman waving the Iranian flag shortly after the cease-fire was announced, with the caption: “Bow down to the Iranian civilization.”

Even Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi indulged in a bit of so-called shitposting (albeit more diplomatically), writing on his X account that “there was no oil or gas” being produced in the Middle East back in the Stone Age. “Are POTUS and Americans who put him in office sure that they want to turn back the clock?” he asked.

And then there are the Lego videos. Created by a group called Explosive Media, the AI-generated videos depict Trump, Hegseth, and the U.S. and Iranian militaries as the yellow figurines from the popular toy brand. One video shows Trump in bed posting on Truth Social that all of Iran’s military fleets have been completely destroyed. An Iranian naval commander reads the post and laughs. He then proceeds to blow up U.S. Navy ships in the Strait of Hormuz with mines, missiles, and drones while Trump, still in bed, begins to sweat as he pictures the price of gas at the pump going up.

Another shows Trump getting more and more apoplectic as U.S. bases get hit by Iranian missiles, traffic in the strait comes to a halt, and world leaders refuse to help him. One of the most viral videos is set to a rap diss track that calls Trump a “loser” and a “puppet” of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. There’s also a separate diss track for Hegseth.

The team behind the videos claims that it is not directly affiliated with the Iranian government, with one member describing it as a “student-led media team with a background in social activism” in an interview with the New Yorker. But the videos have been shared by Iranian state media and have amassed a legion of globaladmirers on social media.

Iranian propaganda against the United States is not a unique or new phenomenon. Iran’s regime and its proxies in the Middle East have spent many decades and dollars building a broadcasting and filmmaking apparatus dedicated to creating and spreading propaganda both to their own people and across the region. The difference now is that that propaganda—turbocharged by new technology—is increasingly aimed at Western and global audiences.

“It’s a distinct change from the standard operating procedure that they have shown in terms of propaganda dissemination,” said Phillip Smyth, an expert in Iran’s proxy groups who tracks Shiite militia propaganda in the Middle East.

Many of the patterns shown in Iran’s messaging through the war have long been present in the Arabic-speaking realm, Smyth said, with the knowledge that Western analysts may follow it. “But the core of the messaging they have is the internalized stuff that’s aimed at, say, people in Iraq,” he added. “Nowadays, it’s a little bit more aimed at an American or a European sense of thinking about the issue. You can tell that there’s been a little bit of effort put in on that.”

AI tools have helped bridge that gap, Smyth said, enabling Iran and other U.S. adversaries, such as China, to create effective propaganda that resonates with Western audiences even when the propagandists themselves may not have an intimate understanding of Western culture. (Another viral AI-generated propaganda video on the war from Chinese state broadcaster CCTV showed Americans as eagles and other birds of prey and the Iranians as Persian cats, which was then widely translated, shared, and covered by global mainstream media.)

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The Iranian and Chinese use of AI-enabled social media mockery throughout the Iran war has arisen in a more permissible environment created by Trump himself. The U.S. president has taken his off-the-cuff social media behavior to new heights over the course of this war, shattering the norms for wartime and broader diplomatic communication in ways that have set a dangerous and violent baseline, argued Texas A&M University history professor Gregory A. Daddis in a piece for Foreign Policy published the day after Trump told Iran in a Truth Social post to “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell.”

That style of communication is catering almost exclusively to Trump’s domestic political base, according to Daddis, who also served for more than two decades in the U.S. Army.

“It’s the audience that finds appealing Kid Rock and Secretary Kennedy working out in a sauna room,” he said in a subsequent interview, referring to a video released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services showing the Trump-supporting musician with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “That’s just not a serious approach to foreign policy,” Daddis said. “The president is continuing to play to that very crass base who just sees this kind of chest thumping as somehow patriotic.”

Other parts of the Trump administration have adopted a similarly flippant AI-enabled social media strategy—long predating but now extending to the Iran war. One video posted by the White House X account splices together Hollywood action movie scenes with footage of actual airstrikes on Iran; another one uses AI to depict the Iranian regime as bowling pins that the U.S. military knocks down.

“We’re over here just grinding away on banger memes, dude,” a senior White House official toldPolitico, with another official boasting that the Iran war videos had received “over 3 billion impressions” online.

When asked by Foreign Policy about the intent behind those videos and the administration’s response to the Iranian videos, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said: “The legacy media wants us to apologize for highlighting the United States Military’s incredible success, but the White House will continue showcasing the many examples of Iran’s ballistic missiles, production facilities, and dreams of owning a nuclear weapon being destroyed in real time.”

The Iranian and Chinese shitposting behavior—a strategy now also being adopted by some U.S. allies, such as France—could be seen in the same vein as what California Gov. Gavin Newsom has done domestically, posting in the style of Trump to “hold up a mirror” and show how ridiculous it is, Daddis said.

“It’s almost a ‘two can play at that game’ kind of thing,” he added. “But again, all this just degrades what’s most needed in these types of crisis situations, which is rational, adult, mature communication between governments. If you can’t engage rationally and maturely with the president of the United States, then what’s left?”

And even as the United States and Iran continue to hash out a tenuous cease-fire and both sides declare victory after a month of fighting, in the war of virality, Iran appears to have at least held its own, if not outright won.

“Something I found fascinating: We’re the only ones talking about those Lego videos. They’re not talking about them in Iraq, they’re not talking about them in Bahrain, they’re not talking about them in Lebanon,” Smyth said. “We’re the ones talking about it, which means they’ve been successful.”