Lego, Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto – three games being used by the US and Iran in a propaganda war while a very real and deadly conflict rages.
Hundreds of lives have been lost in the conflict since the United States and Israel launched military strikes on Iran last month, and there is still no end in sight.
But while missiles are launched and the war widens, both sides have used pop culture to troll the other in what experts warn is a growing trend of deliberately blurring the line between real life and entertainment.
Among the most recent posts is an AI-generated video using Lego figures, posted on Iranian state media, that includes disturbing and offensive imagery throughout.
It opens with US president Donald Trump and Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, joined by the devil, looking at a folder called the ‘Epstein file’.
The Trump figure then presses a giant red button that launches an American-flagged missile at a Muslim girls’ school.
Only a little pink bag and a pair of shoes are left after the blast, an apparent reference to the bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Iran on the first day of the war.
Iran says that least 175 people were killed in the airstrike which was condemned by Unesco as a “grave violation of humanitarian law” and is being investigated by the US.
In retaliation, Lego Iranian officials press their own red button and send a bombardment of missiles and jets to destroy a British military base in Cyprus, and the American Embassy in Saudi Arabia. Both sites were targeted by drones in real life.
Elsewhere in the two-minute clip, a figure in Hassidic dress, soldiers with Israeli flags, and Netanyahu are all seen fleeing.
Often looking like a Lego Movie version of the South Park creators’ satire Team America: World Police, the video follows the White House’s own controversial efforts on social media.
One clip published on the official White House X account shows a character from the Call of Duty video game series ordering an airstrike from his tablet.
It then cuts to real footage 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 song by actor and rapper Childish Gambino.
Another clip published on Friday splices strike footage with a meme of a Grand Theft Auto video game character saying: “Ah s***, here we go again.” After each strike, the word “wasted” flashed across the screen, just as GTA players see when their character dies.
In response to backlash over the GTA video, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly previously told The Independent: “Under the decisive leadership of President Trump, America’s heroic warfighters are meeting or surpassing all of their goals under Operation Epic Fury.
“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.”
Other clips shared by the US on the war have used footage from first person shooter video games like Halo and Hollywood films including Braveheart and Tropic Thunder.
Comedian Ben Stiller and Halo voice actor Steve Downes both called on the White House to remove their respective clips from the war montages.
“Hey White House, please remove the Tropic Thunder clip,” Stiller wrote on X. “We never gave you permission and have no interest in being a part of your propaganda machine. War is not a movie.”
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Dr Iain Overton, director of Action on Armed Violence, said these kinds of videos deliberately blur the line between war and entertainment.
“Visual language borrowed from gaming, memes, etc, reframes violence as spectacle,” he told The Independent. “I find something philosophically unsettling about AI-generated propaganda in particular.
“Traditional propaganda still bore some trace of human intention and of craft. But AI allows states to produce imagery that feels both hyper-real and – in equal regard – detached from reality.”
Technology consultant Dr Lukasz Olejnik said that when military blasts are blended with computer games or animation in this way, the human brain processes the information differently to when a politician presents it in government.
“The moment you put a Call of Duty kill animation over real strike footage, maybe you destroy that distance,” he said.
Dr Olejnik, a visiting senior research fellow at Department of War Studies, King’s College London and author of Propaganda, said he had long predicted states would move away from traditional, “dusty” forms of diplomacy in the age of modern technology.
“That is where attention lives. And attention is now the primary resource in any conflict, including wars,” he said.
But while the social media clips may use video games to spread their message, Dr Olejnik warned against calling the use of pop culture in propaganda “childish” or “unserious”.
“This is a very serious technique,” he said. “Russia resorted to very aggressive actions aimed at its neighbours and Western Europe.
“In Russia’s case, this was also a holistic approach, involving the entire State and information operators, including bots on social networks. This has a use in the war effort.”
Dr Olejnik warned that AI disinformation in particular can have real world consequences, pointing to the Trump administration’s recent campaign to seize Greenland.
AI-generated content portraying the Danish territory as American, published by the US, created a “deliberate ambiguity about whether it was serious”.
This then “created a genuine crisis of interpretation in Copenhagen and Brussels”, according to Dr Olejnik.
“Was this a real territorial threat? A negotiating tactic? Domestic performance for American audiences? Are EU-US relations failing, going down the sink?” he asked.
“European governments genuinely could not tell. They could not tell. That uncertainty had real policy consequences.”
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