Is Iran Winning the Information War?
On Tehran's wildly successful AI-generated Lego music videos
Apologies for my absence last week! I was traveling (and recovering) from the Cambridge Disinformation Summit.
While at the Summit, I ran an online safety workshop. One participant called it “truly invaluable” and another said the content I presented was “saving lives.”
You can have access to this life-saving advice, too! Paid supporters of The Wayfinder will receive my 10-Day Online Safety Tuneup—a toolkit based on my Cambridge workshop—as a perk before the month is out. (All my posts remain free for everyone to access; this is a thank you to those who make that possible.)
If you haven’t become a paid supporter yet, now’s a great time to do so. The Online Safety Tuneup will help you do your digital spring cleaning a little bit each day, but I promise it will be much more pleasant than cleaning your patio furniture.
Is Iran winning the propaganda war? — a new piece in The Nerve
After the Summit, I got to meet with the inimitable Carole Cadwalladr in London. I’ve admired Carole—who broke the Cambridge Analytica scandal, who has long reported on the “right-wing fake news ecosystem,” who coined the term “Broligarchy”—forever.
Last September, Cadwalladr and four colleagues formerly of the Observer (for Americans: the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper) founded The Nerve after the Observer was sold to Tortoise Media. (Read her account of the end of that journalistic era.) They launched the site—which covers politics, culture, and tech—with their redundancy payouts.
Sarah Donaldson, who leads the publication, told the Press Gazette that “the name The Nerve had been chosen because:
we realised nerve is the essential quality needed in our increasingly turbulent world. Too many people in positions of power are losing nerve, and the people we most admire have it in spades. We want to channel that kind of courage into a new publication. As our lives become more and more dominated by AI and algorithms we love that the name feels human and captures the idea of connecting people.
Amen. Nerve has certainly fueled the last four years of my life, so I was honored when Carole asked me to write about those crazy AI-generated Iranian Lego propaganda videos. Is Iran winning the propaganda war? I think so.
They’re crass, they’re childish, and they’re beating Trump at his own game. Iran is winning the information war, and MAGA only has itself to thank...The Trump administration has governed by and for trolls. Now Trump and company are discovering that their tactics are replicable on the increasingly lawless internet they’ve championed, particularly when they resonate with a pissed-off public.
Read the rest of the piece here, give The Nerve a follow on your social media of choice, and sign up for their twice-weekly newsletter. Their content, like mine, is free to access, so support it if you find it valuable.
Finally, send me your questions for another edition of Ask Nina, your digital advice column! Do you have an aunt or uncle who has fallen into an online vortex? Have an online safety question? I can help you (or a ‘friend’ 😉) find their way through this complex information environment. Don’t be shy! Submit here.