On the screen, the animated character cocks his gun and orders a massive nuclear airstrike using a tablet.
The game is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III. Seconds later, real footage appears of US fighter jets taking off from air carriers in the Middle East and bombers striking targets in Iran set to the tune of a Childish Gambino instrumental.
The clip was not the work of an overexcited meme account, but the White House itself. By Sunday it had been viewed by more than 50 million people on X.
It was a world away from the tragic reality unfolding across the Middle East. That same week, military investigators indicated that US forces might be responsible for an apparent strike on an Iranian girls’ school which killed scores of young children. According to the Red Crescent, more than 1,300 people have been killed in Iran since the war began, while the US has itself lost six soldiers to retaliatory Iranian attacks.
As war and suffering engulfs the region, online accounts are betting hundreds of millions of dollars on the future of the Middle East through dystopian platforms such as Polymarket. Meanwhile, AI-generated videos of the war are spreading like wildfire.
Experts argue that all of this behaviour reflect a society that is increasingly desensitised to war as real images of suffering mingle with memes, entertainment and lifestyle content on the modern social media feed.
“We’re witnessing drone feeds that show the last moment of a person’s face up close as they’re killed in a trench in Ukraine or very graphic scenes coming out of Gaza,” says Action on Armed Violence director Iain Overton. “We have an intimacy of war that we’ve never witnessed before.
“This has been a slow evolution even since the Gulf War in 1990, where we began to see grainy feeds of death appearing on our evening news via US military press releases.”
Over time, clips of death on the battlefield have gained traction – with no filter stopping users on social media from accessing traumatic content.
“People are able to watch war close up on the phone in their living room and, at the same time, the granularity of what we’re seeing has become clearer and clearer.”
In the past week, the White House also released a video that spliced a clip of a drone strike with a Spongebob meme where the character says “want to see me do it again?” on repeat.
This strategy did not begin with the war. In January, the White House shared an AI-manipulated image of a woman being arrested for orchestrating “church riots” in Minnesota, where ICE agents fatally shot a US citizen. After sparking outrage over sharing the doctored photograph, a spokesperson simply responded: “The memes will continue”.
Experts say that the use of memes and AI by official channels such as the White House erodes credibility. With mistrust in the establishment at an all-time high, the public is struggling to access accurate information on the war.
The world’s biggest vector of information, Google, has also come under fire. NewsGuard Reality Check warned on Tuesday that Google’s reverse-image tool, widely used to verify images, was “producing inaccurate AI-generated summaries of fabricated and misleading visuals tied to the US-Iran conflict”.
The fact checking organisation identified four instances where Google AI Overviews repeated viral disinformation relating to the war, when prompted with a reverse-image search.
In one instance, where pro-Iranian social media accounts had reposted a video filmed in 2015 to claim that a CIA building in Dubai was struck by an Iranian missile, Google’s AI Overview said: “The image shows a fire at a high-rise residential building in Dubai, UAE, reportedly occurring on March 1, 2026, following regional tensions.
“Conflicting reports emerged regarding the cause, with some sources mentioning a drone strike and others referring to the building as a specific intelligence facility.”
The video showed a fire on a residential tower in the UAE city of Sharjah, not Dubai, according to Reality Check.
Meanwhile, prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket have expanded what people are able to wager on from sports and stocks to a far more precarious market: geopolitics.
People are trading millions of dollars making predictions on everything from Iran’s next supreme leader to more granular decisions, such as when the next wave of strikes on Iran could take place.
A surge in popularity in the Middle East markets prompted Polymarket to issue a notice about the role it could play in forecasting the war. They said: “The promise of prediction markets is to harness the wisdom of the crowd to create accurate, unbiased forecasts for the most important events to society.
“That ability is particularly invaluable in gut-wrenching times like today. After discussing with those directly affected by the attacks, who had dozens of questions, we realized that prediction markets could give them the answers they needed in ways TV news and X could not.”
Already, there is growing suspicion of insider trading after unusually lucky wagers around the arrest of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, and even a recent bet on the fate of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed last weekend in an Israeli strike.
Neil Shearing, an associate fellow for Chatham House’s Global Economics & Finance Programme and the Group Chief Economist at Capital Economics, told The Independent: “They are not regulated in the same way that financial markets are regulated, and that brings with it some risks.
“It does leave them open to potential insider trading,” he explains. “Insider information being used or private information being used to profit on outcomes in a way that is not possible to do or illegal to do with publicly traded companies.”
A user known as Magamyman made more than $553,000 placing bets on Polymarket around Iran and the fate of Khamenei more than an hour before the news broke publicly of his death, when the market had it at just 17 per cent probability. There is no evidence the user benefited from inside knowledge.
Mike Levin, Democratic representative for California, has called on Congress to investigate insider trading allegations.
“Some questions worth asking: Who had that information? How did they get it? And why were the DOJ and CFTC’s active investigations into Polymarket dropped the moment the Trump Administration took office?” he asked on X.
The Independent has reached out to Polymarket, Google and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for comment.
As the war grinds on, the spread of misinformation and AI-generated content will continue – distorting opinions about the war and blinding a new generation to the suffering that lies beyond the screen. Worse still, Mr Overton says, many will make money from death and destruction.
“If we begin to profit from the death of others, what does that do to our own sense of our relationship between profit and human dignity?”
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