Brett Schaefer

There are claims that they

had potentially murdered thousands, if not tens of thousands of protesters.

And outside of that, Iran did not have a very positive global image.

Their image was quite negative.

They were seen as a regressive regime.

They were seen as authoritarian.

And so now, at least audiences on X are seeing them a little bit as a plucky underdog here.

They're coming across as a bit

more playful.

And so I think many audiences have sort of lost the sort of history of who these embassies are representing.

And so I do think that that has had an effect on global public opinion, because now Iran is seen as the underdog taking on the United States and not as an authoritarian government that has cracked down on protesters at home.

Yeah, I mean, you know, this is a problem of the social media era, right?

I mean, it's increasingly difficult to get really solid, credible information across social media channels because, as we talked about earlier...

The AI slopaganda era just increasingly has meant that you are seeing a lot of low quality news in your feeds.

And so they're trying to break through that clutter here and capture a moment of people's attention.

That's what they're going for.

They're not effectively trying to make a counter argument to the argument the U.S.

has made about why they launched this war.

They're just trying to get audiences to share their content and to laugh for a moment.

It is fair enough to say.