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. There are AI-generated Lego-style videos mocking Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, clips of Black creators addressing Iran directly and telling the country they have no quarrel with it, and posts pointing to a 47-year-old hostage crisis as evidence of solidarity.

Most coverage has framed this as a disinformation campaign. What’s in my feed is more mixed. Fabricated content, documented history, and creators speaking for themselves all move 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 some audiences are more receptive than others.

Iran is using TikTok to reach audiences its government could never reach through traditional channels. During an earlier round of fighting, in June 2025, the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism at Reichman University in Israel, a think tank Foreign Affairs described as presenting “an Israeli perspective,” identified five categories of AI-generated content from pro-Iranian accounts, including fake claims about captured pilots backed by AI-made evidence. That campaign ran in Farsi, Arabic, Hebrew, English, and several East Asian languages. In this war, fabricated footage of Israeli destruction spread again.

The Lego-style videos have been among the most widely shared. Iran’s state-run Revayat-e Fath made an early one. The series that went viral comes from Explosive Media, a group of pro-Tehran creators that calls itself independent but is “widely suspected of ties to the Iranian government,” AFP reported. The videos use generative AI to look like Lego movies. A representative of one production account told the BBC the team uses the Lego look “because it is a world language.” TikTok says its systems remove some violent and graphic videos automatically when they’re uploaded, 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 who receives the message and why.

A study published in War on the Rocks surveyed 193 U.S. college-age TikTok users and found that the platform shapes how people feel more than what they believe. 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 gets a reaction. When that content is rooted in real grievance and reaches an audience that has lived that grievance, nobody has to manipulate the algorithm. It is already doing what it was built to do.

For my master’s thesis, 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 seen now shapes which wartime messages reach which audiences.

On TikTok, a video from 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.”

Jamila Bell’s video, addressed to Iran. Watch the video on TikTok.
VIDEO: @_IAMJAMILA ON TIKTOK

In an Economist/YouGov poll taken March 6 to 9, a week after the strikes began, 69% of Black adults disapproved of how Trump was handling the situation in Iran, and 17% approved. Among all adults, 52% disapproved. Republican voters supported the military action 85% to 11% in a Quinnipiac survey released March 9.

A viral claim has also been circulating that Iran has said it doesn’t 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 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 worked 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 isn’t Iranian government policy. It’s a myth built on things that happened, which is part of why it travels.

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. In 2023, Black Americans made up 19.5% of active-duty enlisted troops, according to the Defense Department, and about 14% of the U.S. population. Word In Black published an op-ed titled “We Bombed Iran. Black Folks Are Asking: Who Is ‘We’?” For a group that mostly disapproved of the war from its first week, the word “we” assumes a decision that was never made together.

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 inside its own borders.

The U.S. has long 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 consul general in Japan, openly gay and partnered, using his own visibility as the message. The least effective collapsed when credibility at home disappeared.

Iran’s strategy follows the same logic, aimed the other way. Find a shared grievance, point it at a common target, and build sympathy with people who already have reasons to distrust that target. Iran doesn’t need anyone to support the Islamic Republic. This is a government that executed more than 2,000 people in 2025 alone, the most 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, in which 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. Analyzing how a government’s public diplomacy works doesn’t mean endorsing the government that runs it. Iran needs people to oppose the war. On that narrow goal, the message reached an audience that was already there.

In March, 61% of Americans disapproved of Trump’s handling of the conflict, according to Pew Research. Quinnipiac found that 74% opposed 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 whole broadcasting systems to reach foreign audiences, such as Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, and the BBC World Service. In 2026, a group suspected of ties to a government can make an AI Lego cartoon, upload it, and let the platform do the distribution. If the United States wants to contest that messaging, it first has to understand why its own case hasn’t persuaded people.

The algorithm puts all of it in the same feed. The AI-made destruction footage is fabricated. The creator videos are people speaking for themselves. The history is documented.

Update, Oct. 18, 2026: The United States and Iran agreed to a two-week ceasefire on April 8 and signed a memorandum in June meant to end the war. Talks broke down, and the U.S. resumed strikes on July 8. As of Oct. 17, the fighting continues, centered on the Strait of Hormuz, ABC News reported. In April, YouTube removed Explosive Media’s channel, calling it spam. Our Read the statement story covers what YouTube said and what TikTok didn’t.

We asked TikTok for comment on Oct. 18. It didn’t answer by Oct. 21.

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