Why Iran Is Winning the Slop War |
There are enormous gaps in the information available about the war with Iran. In the country at the center of the conflict, tight media and internet controls, pervasive fear, and hobbled infrastructure have stemmed its flow. In nearby Gulf states, wartime rules and arrests have suppressed coverage and quieted an early surge in social-media posts from citizens and expat influencers; similarly, Israeli authorities have expanded their press crackdown, citing the conflict to justify heightened restrictions and detaining journalists. The American press’s access to Iran is severely limited, as is its access to the United States military, which has no “boots on the ground” (at least for now).
Part of this gap has been filled by reporters working around these limits, as well as by regular citizens sharing, often anonymously and at great risk to themselves, video and testimony from the ground. But the entire world wants to know what’s happening in the Middle East, and the demand for new information is intense. Governments involved in the conflict, in their own ways, have seized on the opportunity: America, with staggeringly juvenile social-media hype videos intercutting movie and video-game clips with war footage, intended to mobilize its most MAGA citizens with “banger memes, dude,” as one White House official put it, or at least to troll everyone else; Israel, with prolific and aggressive official updates from military social-media channels it’s been building up longer than anyone else; and Iran, with defiant videos projecting confidence at audiences abroad while hard-line, tightly managed domestic media handles messaging within its borders.
But the rest of this information gap has been filled, and then some, by AI. It’s been called a slop war, and for millions of social-media users around the world — on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and X, but also in large channels on chat apps like Telegram — AI has provided some of the most memorable imagery of recent weeks. Untethered from the reality on the ground, and driven by nationalistic and partisan impulses, but also by the commercial incentives of social media, the slop war is unfolding in its own independent way and according to its own grimly whimsical logic. Inside this algorithmic seam, where nearly anything is possible and nothing is quite true, it’s Iran — the technological laggard of the conflict, with no AI industry to speak of — that seems to be benefiting the most.
The first way this works is at the level of state propaganda, where AI-generated video has been deployed or endorsed by governments and government-controlled sources. Some of this is more subtle, less direct, and either allowed or intended to be misleading:
This video posted by the official Persian account of the Israeli government claims to show a member of the Basij paramilitary force on the streets of Tehran being targeted by a strike.But it's AI-generated. Follow this thread to find out how we can verify that it's AI. https://t.co/xADRltHO5N pic.twitter.com/deraQ0Ds6o— Shayan Sardarizadeh (@Shayan86) March 18, 2026
This video posted by the official Persian account of the Israeli government claims to show........