In March 2026, people on social media began sharing an animated video they said Iranian media had released to "troll" U.S. President Donald Trump. For example, one popular post on X (archived) said:
🚨BREAKING
Iranian media has released an animation titled "Lord of the Straits," themed around the Strait of Hormuz.
The video, along with the claim it originated from Iranian media, appeared across other social media platforms such as Facebook (archived), Reddit (archived) and Threads (archived).
Snopes could not find conclusive evidence the video was released by Iranian media. The earliest example of the video we found was not from an official media outlet but instead an account that appeared to belong to an Iranian politician. However, we have not rated this claim because we could not independently confirm the video's origin.
Finding the source
All of the social media posts above shared a version of the video with a watermark crediting @ww3mediaa. A search for that social media handle found a Turkish-language X account of the same name. That account posted its version (archived) of the animated Lord of the Straits video at 11:16 a.m. EDT March 22, 2026.
Considering the animation contained Persian text, it was unlikely that the Turkish-language account was the original source.
Snopes found an earlier example of the video without the @ww3mediaa watermark in a Persian-language post (archived) from 7:16 a.m. that same day. The post itself, when automatically translated to English by X, said, "Check out #LordOfTheStraits animation, #StraitOfHormuz."
That post was from an account using the name Seyed Mohammad Hosseini. The account's owner identified himself in his bio as a faculty member of the University of Tehran, according to X's automatic translation of the bio. A reverse image search of the account's image found a similar image of the same person in a Wikipedia article for Mohammad Hosseini, an Iranian politician who has served as the country's minister of culture.
Snopes could not confirm the account belonged to the politician. We reached out to the University of Tehran's international affairs office to request contact information for Hosseini or confirmation that the account was his and whether he was the video's originator.
We could not find evidence that a version of the video was uploaded online prior to Hosseini's post, however. A reverse image search for one of the video's frames led to Aparat, an Iranian video-sharing website, but the upload date for that video could not be confirmed because the website was down.
Checking Iranian media
Because an internet blackout in Iran prevents access to most Iranian news sites, we also checked the X accounts of various Iranian news sources for the animation.
The video wasn't uploaded by the English-language accounts of PressTV (archived), Fars News Agency (archived), Tasnim News Agency (archived), Mehr News Agency (archived), IRNA News Agency (archived) and the Tehran Times (archived). The Persian-language accounts of Mashregh News (archived), the Tasnim News Agency (archived) and the Fars News Agency (archived) did not upload the video, either.
The closest reference to the video Snopes could find was a Tehran Times front page that referred to Iran as the Lord of Hormuz (archived)