What 2,655 Telegram posts over 3 months of war and peace tell us about the Iranian media
Akhbar Enfejari — literally Explosive News — is a Persian-language Telegram channel run by a team of young Iranians. They cover weather, memes, films, geopolitics, and what they call the "media traps" of their enemies, all in rapid succession, often dozens of times a day.
For this investigation I scraped every post from December 31, 2025 to April 9, 2026, a period that brackets the 40-day US–Iran war that began on February 28. That gave me 2,840 messages: 981 videos, 1,665 images, and 194 text-only dispatches.
In an interview, the founder of Explosive Media told me they are less than 10 people in the team, with all of them being 25 years old or under. Growing up watching Captain Tsubasa, he said, "We use a mix of AI tools, animation software, and editing techniques — but I won't name them. That's part of the magic." He told me he has not been contacted by The LEGO Group, and uses AI tools developed in-house or accessed via VPN because of sanctions. While YouTube and Instagram have taken down their pages several times already, he said, "Our pages have been shut down multiple times. But it's never really stopped us. We have friends all over the world who keep sharing our work across platforms." Explosive Media — or Akhbar Enfejari — has now set up a channel to receive donations via Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
Every post was transcribed, translated from Persian, classified by theme and keyword, and cross-referenced by subject. Videos were sampled into key-frame screenshots. The patterns that emerge are the subject of this piece.
Five recent posts hand-picked from late March and early April — the stop-motion Lego style Explosive Media has made its own. Drag, swipe, or use the arrows.
Posting volume holds steady — between 60 and 80 messages a day — then spikes to 108 on February 28, the day Tehran was first hit. After mid-March the channel slows down and shifts to producing Lego animations.
Daily post volume on @akhbarenfejari. The Jan. 9 – Jan. 22 gap is a data-collection interruption, not a channel silence. The Feb. 28 spike marks the first US–Israeli strikes on Tehran.
We sorted each post into themes that emerged directly from the feed — AI and sanctions workarounds, regime politics, pop culture, foreign intervention, economy, international news, weather. Read in sequence, they form a portrait.
Iranians are dodging American AI sanctions — and cataloguing both how to use the tools and how to see through them. On January 1 the channel's first post of the year was a Christmas portrait generator for Gemini, with detailed prompt parameters and a warning to install a VPN first. Days later it ran a Porsche ad praised for being "made by humans, not AI," a geolocation investigation debunking protest footage as fake, and a tutorial on spotting AI-generated images.
In January the channel platformed anti-regime voices: Amin Salimi telling people to protest "within a framework," mockery of Mohammad Reza Farzin's appointment as economic advisor, Foad Izadi warning not to trust Axios. Then at 01:22 AM on February 28, the first US–Israeli strike hit Tehran. The feed became a live battle tracker. By mid-March it was producing Lego-animated music videos in praise of the IRGC and Ayatollah Khamenei.
Each tile is one classified post. Anti-regime posts sit on the left of the dividing line, pro-regime on the right; they're stacked by date so you can watch the channel's voice shift across the war. Hover a tile to see the post.
Hover or tap any tile to read the post. Posts that didn't yield a clean key-frame are shown as solid color blocks.
Between the geopolitics, the team betrays how young it is. Exam-night memes. The friend who texts you the key points half an hour before the test. Parents' terms of endearment lifted from Iranian films.
Stories about foreign meddling loop back to Iran's own anxieties. The channel followed the Jalisco cartel taking Guadalajara — a 2026 World Cup host city — in granular detail, and revisited its geolocation of protest footage the regime calls foreign-staged.
Sanctions, appointments, and the cost of bypassing both. The channel mocks the Farzin appointment, charts which countries America sanctions most, and quietly teaches workarounds for sanctioned technology.
Gaza. Axios. Jeffrey Sachs saying Washington "never intended to negotiate." The Gaza football team thanking Pep Guardiola. JD Vance booed at the Milan Olympics. The channel curates a very specific map of the world — one where American media always has an angle.
Flamingos at Miankaleh wetland with Damavand in the distance. 1.5 meters of snowfall on the Mahabad-to-Boukan road. Snowfall in Ahar. In Marivan. In the border villages of Urmia. Posted with background music and no politics.
Each tile below is one post. Videos in steel blue, images in muted gray, text-only in deep navy. The red column is February 28 — the day Tehran was struck, and the day the channel's posture flipped.
2,840 messages. 100 days. One channel. Seven windows into Iran.