“A second senior White House official who is also closely involved in the video-making effort described it as a collegial, creative endeavor. ‘We’re over here just grinding away on banger memes, dude’”

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/18/white-house-iran-game-online-00834373

Inside the White House plan to sell the Iran war online

The administration is bucking decades of decorum by depicting the Iran war as a violent video game.

Politico
@acdha I’ll go ahead and predict that the war will continue to be unpopular despite the awesomeness of these banger memes. This is the kind of stupid shit that happens when you’re ruled by the Very Online.
@nswigger I’m betting you’re right. Nobody is paying more for gas and saying that it’s worth it for the engagement metrics.
@acdha Social media isn’t real life. It’s not the town square. I don’t know how many times we need to learn this.
@nswigger I think there’s also a class of cognitive errors introduced by being easy to measure: people see impression counters think it’s important because that number is always there.
@acdha Yeah, it’s hard to convince people that the dopamine hits they get from seeing likes on their posts are totally meaningless.