State and synthetic narratives rise
China’s state media are increasingly using social platforms and AI to craft and amplify narratives, while independent creators are producing viral, emotionally driven AI videos about conflict — blending synthetic production with 'heart' to drive views. These parallel trends show that both governments and creators are adopting social‑native, meme‑literate formats to compete for attention. (YourSourceOne/AP via YourSourceOne, The Verge)
A five-minute cartoon from Chinese state media turned the United States into a white eagle and Iranians into black-cloaked cats, then pushed the war in Iran through the language of martial-arts fantasy instead of a news bulletin. That shift showed up in an Associated Press report published on April 10, 2026, and it is not a one-off experiment. (abcnews.com) Chinese outlets are now making propaganda that looks like the rest of the internet: short, visual, emotional, and built for feeds on X and Facebook instead of a television anchor desk. The Associated Press said Beijing has built a “matrix” of accounts run by diplomats, state media, influencers, and bots to aim those messages at audiences outside China. (abcnews.com) This is happening after years of pressure from Xi Jinping to give China a bigger voice abroad and to answer what Beijing sees as hostile Western coverage. The new tool is artificial intelligence, because it can turn a foreign-policy line into a polished video in days instead of a studio production in weeks. (abcnews.com) The same visual style is showing up outside formal state media too. In March 2026, artificial-intelligence videos of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu as Lego figures spread across social platforms with war scenes, rap tracks, and English-language jokes aimed at Western viewers. (time.com) One reason those clips traveled so fast is that they were built to fit the internet’s house style. Forbes reported that Graphika traced one Lego Trump video to the Telegram account Akhbar Enfejari, or “Explosive News,” and said reposts by Tasnim News and the Russian state outlet RT helped drive it to large audiences within an hour. (forbes.com) The numbers were not small. Forbes said RT’s repost on X came from an account with 3.5 million followers and drew 850,000 views, while another X user pushed one Lego Trump clip to 2.5 million views. (forbes.com) What makes this messier is that the line between official and unofficial is often blurry on purpose. Time reported that some viral videos were aired on Iranian state television and linked in coverage to the Revayat-e Fath Institute, while the group behind many clips, calling itself the “Explosive News Team,” told The New Yorker it was student-run and independent. (time.com) Iran’s government and its orbit are also using the same voice on regular text posts. The Times of Israel reported that after Donald Trump threatened Iran over the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s embassy in Zimbabwe posted, “We’ve lost the keys,” while Iran’s embassy in Thailand mocked him for swearing “like a teenager.” (timesofisrael.com) That is the common thread between the Chinese eagle cartoon and the Lego war videos: both swap formal messaging for memes, characters, and platform-native jokes. Time put it plainly on April 2, 2026: generative artificial intelligence makes it cheap to produce polished propaganda at scale and easy to blur who made it. (time.com) The result is a feed where a government ministry, a state broadcaster, a proxy network, and an anonymous creator can all use the same editing style and chase the same audience. By the time a viewer sees the clip, the most important fact may no longer be whether it is real footage or animation, but whether it feels native to the platform and worth sharing. (abcnews.com)
