Digital Diplomacy 2.0?
From credible influence to weaponizing Nostalgia via AI
The onset of the Trump presidency has accelerated a trend that cuts through years of debate about propaganda, influence operations, and public diplomacy. State power moves through culture differently than it used to.
The structural logic of what authoritarian states call an influence operation and what democratic governments call a communications strategy is, at its core, identical. What differs isn’t the mechanism. It’s the institutional wrapper, the degree of disclosure, and the normative framework we apply when we assess it.
From Chinamaxxing to Dubai’s Influencer Playbook
The “becoming Chinese” trend is gaining traction among Western creators and has been around since 2025. IShowSpeed is credited as having started it with his visit to China, but there are others - Hasan Piker, The Nelk Boys, Pokimane. While critics describe this meme as fetishizing Chinese culture for a convenient trend, it hasn’t prevented “chinamaxxing” from trending in the US and now extending globally.
Due to its timing, this meme trend has turned into a soft power win for China emerging as a direct repsonse to the soft power vacuum left by American retreat from cultural diplomacy.
While IshowSpeed trip to China was self sponsored, perhaps no case illustrates the maturity of state-influencer infrastructure better than what happened in Dubai just last week. As Iranian strikes hit the region, influencers from different countries with millions of followers began posting nearly identical content within hours reaffirming Dubai as the safest place in the world.
The speed and coordination suggested something beyond organic response.
When State Campaigns Become Viral Culture
Here’s where it gets more complex. Nobody knows for certain whether these campaigns were initially state-sponsored or not. But at least in Dubai, the initial wave appears coordinated, suggesting institutional backing. But as in the case for chinamaxxing, sometimes memes grow into their own viral trends that may be boosted by states, but take on a life of their own.
Chinamaxxing is now a genuine cultural phenomenon. The Dubai influencers’ “who keeps us safe” framing also became a meme picked up globally, including by Germany’s Auswärtiges Amt (Foreign Office). The content was adapted, transformed, recontextualized. But the core framing traveled far beyond its origins becoming a self-perpetuating cultural moment that outlived and transcended their potential institutional origins.
The question I keep asking myself is, if these forms of credbile influence campaigns / trends already constitutes a form of propaganda. Reimagined as ambient culture, these types of trends are aesthetically fluent and structurally indistinguishable from organic content.
AI Vdeo and Nostalia as Tools of State Persuasion
But there is more. Governments have added AI to their playbook via deepfakes filtered through nostalgia and meme culture. In the context of the Iran War both parties, Iran and the US / Israel, are producing AI-generated videos using familiar framing like SpongeBob or Lego to frame their perspective in the current conflict, which consists of a lot of meme-driven imaging around military strikes, bundling clips from war movies, or video games with actual strike footage . These messages delivered through official channels but amplified through social platforms using multiple vectors, e.g. organic engagement, creator partnerships, memetic warfare. Each reinforcing the others until origin becomes impossible to trace.
Much of this is direct state production of AI-generated content. The influencer ecosystem represents another delivery system. Both exploit the same core mechanism - cultural familiarity as a shortcut to persuasion. While this is definetly a form of propaganda, the genius behind this uniquely powerful form is timing. It lands as entertainment before audiences process it as persuasion. By invoking beloved cultural references from childhood media and gaming culture, states across regime types use the same structural playbook, which is manufacturing familiar-feeling content that bypasses critical thinking through emotional resonance.
A SpongeBob meme doesn’t feel like state messaging. A Lego-format explainer doesn’t trigger propaganda defenses. The nostalgia creates comfort and familiarity trust.
When Digital Diplomacy Becomes Indistinguishable from Influence Operations
Traditional digital diplomacy has evolved. What once operated through clearly marked channels with identifiable state actors has dissolved into something harder to categorize.
The questions I ask myself are
if democratic and authoritarian states use identical structural logic, how do we maintain meaningful distinctions?
What distinguishes legitimate public diplomacy from engineered cultural influence at scale, since traditional markers don’t hold anymore?
Consider the White House meme-heavy approach to communicating. Compare it to Dubai’s coordinated influencer messaging or the organic soft power play that “becoming Chinese” represents. The aesthetic differs. The disclosure framework differs. But the structural logic of using trusted cultural voices and familiar references to bypass critical evaluation? Identical.
The tools of digital influence operate the same way regardless of who deploys them. Memes attached to a military strike or explaining geopolitical strategy exploit the cognitive shortcut of cultural familiarity lowering psychological defenses, which makes it so powerful.
Is this actually working?
The evidence is mixed and troubling.. This scattershot approach, heavy on memes and cultural references, light on traditional wartime presidential communication, reveals something important. The goal isn’t to build broad-based support through careful explanation of objectives and coalition-building. It’s to maintain intensity through constant cultural engagement.
The nostalgia-driven, meme-heavy approach may be building enthusiasm within specific demographics. It creates instant resonance with audiences who share those cultural touchstones and leads to engagement, shares, viral moments.They generate engagement, shares, viral moments. But they may also create ceilings, where the very familiarity that draws some audiences in alienates others who don’t share the reference points or who resent seeing childhood entertainment weaponized for political purposes. Ben Stiller's negative response to having Tropic Thunder clips used in White House war messaging captures this backlash.
Yet even this resistance becomes content. The controversy generates more engagement, more visibility, more cultural penetration of the original messaging. Whether people approve or object, the meme has done its work: making war feel like familiar entertainment rather than distant policy.
Defining Digital Diplomacy 2.0
Traditional public diplomacy operated with clear rules. Cultural exchange programs, international broadcasting, educational initiatives. All clearly marked as state-sponsored. All operating on the assumption that persuasion should happen through information and argument, not emotional manipulation.
The influencer ecosystem broke those rules. Credible influence operates in gray zones where disclosure is partial, where organic and sponsored blend, where state messaging flows through trusted voices without clear attribution.
AI-generated nostalgia content accelerates this breakdown as cutlural referenced optimized for emotional resonance contribute to collpase of the distinction between public diplomacy and propaganda. It's simply too effective, too scalable, too aligned with how attention economies actually function.
The way forward is to define urgent unresolved questions that are emerging due to this evolution and adapt tools to increase resilience from this form of propaganda.