Iran’s War Message Is Reaching Black Americans Through TikTok’s Algorithm
I didn’t go looking for Iranian war propaganda. TikTok’s algorithm served it to me.
Over the past several weeks, my feed has filled with content I never searched for: AI-generated Lego-style videos mocking Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. Clips of Black creators addressing Iran directly, telling the country they have no quarrel with it. Posts referencing a 47-year-old hostage crisis as evidence of solidarity.
Most coverage has framed this as a disinformation campaign. It is something more layered than that. Fabricated content, documented history, and organic creator expression are all moving through the same feed, weighted by the same engagement signals. Public diplomacy, the field I trained in at USC Annenberg, is the effort by an international actor to understand, engage, and influence foreign publics. That definition covers what Iran is doing on TikTok. It also covers what the White House is doing on X. The question is how each side’s message travels, who it reaches, and why certain audiences are more receptive than others.
The Algorithm Is the New Broadcast Tower
Iran is using TikTok to reach audiences its government could never reach through traditional channels. The International Institute for Counter-Terrorism at Reichman University in Israel, a think tank described by Foreign Affairs as presenting “an Israeli perspective,” identified five categories of AI-generated content from pro-Iranian accounts, including fabricated footage of Israeli destruction and fake claims about captured pilots reinforced with AI-generated evidence. The campaign operates in Farsi, Arabic, Hebrew, English, and several East Asian languages.
The Lego-style videos have been among the most widely shared. Produced by Iran’s state-run Revayat-e Fath institute, which is linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, they use generative AI to build animations designed to look like Lego movies. The format is strategic. A representative of one production account told the BBC the team uses the Lego aesthetic “because it is a world language.” TikTok’s content filters catch violent or military imagery, but Lego visuals read as playful. One video reportedly reached millions of views before moderators flagged it. Meanwhile, the White House posted videos to X and TikTok mixing real strike footage with clips from Call of Duty, Iron Man, and Top Gun. Both governments are using algorithmic platforms to shape how people feel about this war. The difference is in who is receiving the message and why.
A study published in War on the Rocks surveyed 193 U.S. college-aged TikTok users and found that the platform does not change what people believe. It changes how they feel. The algorithm reinforces emotional responses through engagement signals, producing what the researchers called “affective convergence,” meaning feeds become emotionally uniform even when users aren’t looking for reinforcement. TikTok doesn’t need to convert anyone. It amplifies content that generates a reaction. When that content is rooted in real grievance and arrives at an audience with lived experience of that grievance, the algorithm doesn’t need to be manipulated. It is already doing what it was built to do.
For my MSc thesis at University College Dublin, I studied how TikTok’s algorithm shaped visibility for Black LGBTQ+ creators. Two-thirds of participants believed their content was being unfairly suppressed. One creator told me certain topics were “too Black for the algorithm.” The same platform design that shaped which creators got visibility is now shaping which wartime messaging reaches which audiences.
The History Iran Is Referencing
On TikTok, a video from content creator Jamila Bell has been viewed more than 4 million times. In it, she addresses Iran directly. “I just want to speak on behalf of my people. We ain’t never had an issue with y’all.” According to a YouGov/Economist poll conducted shortly after the U.S.-Israeli strikes began, only 7% of Black respondents supported the bombing, with 66% opposed. Republican voters, by contrast, supported the military action at 85% in a separate Quinnipiac survey.
A viral claim has also been circulating that Iran has said it does not want to hurt Black people. Word In Black investigated and found no verified current statement from the Iranian government to support it. But the reporting documented what the claim draws on. During the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ordered the release of 13 hostages, all women or African Americans, with a message that Black Americans were already oppressed by their own government. Word In Black traced the longer pattern: Iran issued a postage stamp honoring Malcolm X in 1984, Iranian student revolutionaries collaborated with the Black Panther Party in the 1970s, and Iran’s Supreme Leader criticized the treatment of Black Americans during the 2020 George Floyd protests.
The viral claim is not Iranian government policy. It is a myth built on a factual foundation. That distinction is the most important thing to understand about what is circulating on TikTok.
I know why this resonates. I grew up in a country where the question of who is protected has never had a simple answer for Black people. Black Americans make up roughly 19% of active-duty military enlistments despite being about 13.7% of the population, according to DOD demographics data analyzed by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Word In Black published an op-ed titled “We Bombed Iran. Black Folks Are Asking: Who Is ‘We’?” For a population that overwhelmingly opposed this conflict before it started, the word “we” assumes a collective decision that was never made.
Not everyone is receiving the message the same way. Other Black creators have pushed back, calling Iran’s use of Black music, Black symbols, and Black idols a form of exploitation, borrowing from Black resistance culture to recruit opposition to the U.S. government while ignoring the Afro-Iranian community within its own borders.
Public Diplomacy Through the Algorithm
The U.S. has historically tried to win over specific communities in other countries. Iran is doing the same thing in reverse, reaching a specific community inside the United States through a channel the public diplomacy textbooks never anticipated. At USC Annenberg, I studied how the State Department advanced LGBTQ+ human rights abroad. The most effective public diplomacy I documented worked because it was grounded in something real, like a former consulate general in Japan, openly gay and partnered, using his own visibility as the message. The least effective collapsed when domestic credibility disappeared.
Iran’s strategy follows the same logic, aimed in the opposite direction. Find a shared grievance, point it at a common target, and build sympathy with people who already have reasons to distrust that target. Iran does not need us to support the Islamic Republic. This is a government that executed over 2,000 people in 2025 alone, the highest number in more than 30 years. It sentences LGBTQ+ people to death under its penal code. A UN Fact-Finding Mission documented mass killings of protesters, enforced disappearances where the government detained people and refused to acknowledge holding them, and the deportation of LGBTQ+ people to Afghanistan. As a gay Black man, I am under no illusions about what this regime represents. But analyzing how a government’s public diplomacy works is not the same as endorsing the government that runs it. Iran needs us to not support the war. On that narrow objective, the message arrived at an audience that was already there.
A full 61% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the conflict, according to Pew Research. Quinnipiac found 74% oppose sending ground troops, including 52% of Republicans. NATO allies including Germany, the UK, France, and Italy declined to join a U.S.-led naval coalition to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
During the Cold War, states built entire broadcasting systems to reach foreign audiences such as Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, and the BBC World Service. In 2026, a state-run institute can produce an AI-generated Lego cartoon, upload it, and let the platform do the distribution. If the United States wants to contest that messaging, it will first need to understand why its own case has not persuaded people.
The algorithm puts all of it in the same feed. The AI-generated destruction footage is fabricated. The creator videos are genuine expressions. The historical references are documented facts. The platform makes no distinction. We have to.