GT investigates: Behind gunfire and bloodshed, how is the Middle East situation being turned into a social media farce?

More than three months have passed since the US-Israeli strikes on Iran erupted on February 28. Over the past weekend, the US and Iran reportedly to have reached an agreement to end fighting and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, with a formal signing ceremony scheduled for Friday in Switzerland. Yet substantial progress, at least to date, has yet to be achieved.

While beyond the smoke and fury in the Persian Gulf and the standoff in the Strait of Hormuz, the situation on another "front" appears to have grown increasingly intense and complex.

Since the conflict started, the White House, according to reports, has posted on social media platforms AI-generated videos, some of which pair footage of US airstrikes with popular short-video effects in an apparent effort to underscore US military dominance. The videos were widely criticized by media outlets and netizens for using AI to commodify, and even make light of, the Middle Eastern battlefield and its victims.

"[I've watched] a little bit [of the videos the White House shared]. And what would be disturbing to me is if it's perceived as a gaming kind of event," said US Army veteran Karee White in a PBS program in March. "And I don't like to see it reduced to some sort of a gaming strategy type of event, if that's been in fact what's happening…"

When virtual effects dilute the brutality of artillery fire and meme culture obscures the human cost of conflict, how has the smoke of this digital battlefield spread? In this AI-driven information war of manufactured narratives, what dazzling "tactics" have both the US and Iran deployed? And what deeper dangers lie beneath this new form of public opinion confrontation?

An 'entertainmentized' contest

"Generative AI has made it cheap and easy to produce polished propaganda at scale, …packaging war in the visual language of entertainment makes conflict propaganda more likely to spread, regardless of who made it," Renée DiResta, an associate research professor at Georgetown University whose work focuses on how influence operates in the digital age, said in a TIME article published on April 2.

DiResta's concern was vividly borne out in the information warfare that has unfolded alongside the US-Israeli strikes on Iran. As generative AI has rapidly proliferated and low-cost, highly shareable AI-generated content has become an important weapon in the battle for public opinion. Some scholars observed that the US and Iran have turned to AI-generated memes, animated re-edits and game-style mashups to wage narrative offensives and counteroffensives, rendering the war in the Middle East, in virtual space, into what increasingly resembles an "entertainmentized" contest.

Since early March, the White House has frequently posted visually striking videos on social media, many of which have drawn heavily on iconic scenes from Hollywood blockbusters and kill-focused video games.

A video the White House posted on X on March 6 with the caption "justice the American way," for instance, included clips from superhero movies, as well as clips from films Top Gun and Braveheart, with electronic tunes underneath before clipping to video of strikes on Iran. It ends with a voiceover saying, "flawless victory" - audio from the video game Mortal Kombat, reported ABC News the following day.

More startling still, in a video that went viral after being released on X by the White House on March 6, footage of a US strike on Iranian targets was followed by a scene of cartoon image "SpongeBob SquarePants," asking: "do you want to see me do it again?"

A brutal military assault was packaged as a kind of "visual spectacle" through these videos, which, blurring the line between the virtual and the real, the entertaining and the grave, has drawn widespread criticism. "Has the White House account been hacked or are you guys really that immature and depraved?" an X user wrote under this post. "This is embarrassing," wrote another.

In response, Explosive Media, an account described by the BBC News as known for generating Lego-style satire videos against the US and Israel, has posted a series of rough-edged but highly imaginative Lego animations. Some of these videos use Lego figures to dramatize scenarios in which Israeli and US leaders collude to wage war and deflect domestic political pressure, while interspersing images of soaring oil prices and burning US dollars.

In an April interview, a representative of Explosive Media told the BBC that "the Iranian government is indeed a 'customer' of his company," and ahead of that, he said "his operation had been directly commissioned for multiple projects by Iranian officials," according to a BBC story on April 12.

Also in April, YouTube shut down the Explosive Media's account, reported Al Jazeera. On June 11, it was announced on X that the account was "officially back on YouTube."

Nevertheless, the company's AI-generated videos have given Iran enormous visibility on social media. According to a research by think tank Institute for Strategic Dialogue in April, by posting and forwarding such AI satire videos, in the first 50 days of the conflict, posts from Iranian embassy and official accounts collectively gained approximately 900 million views and 22 million likes - a 30-fold increase in likes compared with the preceding 50 days. "If Iran could manufacture destructive missiles at the speed with which it produces cutting memes, US Central Command would be coming out with its hands up by now," quipped an opinion piece by The Guardian on April 15.