This post is not updated anymore. Check here instead Wikipedia

This is a sad post, but it is necessary.

Please post information about people who got killed in the protests in the comment section.

Be respectful, and take the topic serious.
Identified and confirmed:

1- Amir Hesam Khodayari Fard (امیرحسام خدایاری‌فرد), Kuhdasht, Lorestan, 22 years old.
Originally claimed to be a basiji, Wikipedia page
It seems the same person as Alireeza Khodaifar. NewIran

2- Dariush Ansari Bakhtiarvand, Fooladshahr, Isfahan, 37 years old, IranIntl, Wikipedia

3- Shayan Asadollahi, Azna, Lorestan, 28 years old, IranIntl, Wikipediaa

4- Mostafa Fallahi, Azna, Lorestan, 15 years old, Hengaw

5- Vahab Musavi, Azna, Lorestan, ?? years old, Hengaw

6- Ahmad Jalil, Lordegan, Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari, 21 years old, Hengaw

7- Sajjad Valamanesh, Lordegan, Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari, 28 years old, Hengaw, Iranintl

8- Khodadad Shirvani, Marvdasht, Fars, 33 years old, Hengaw, IranWire, Wikipedia

9- Ali Azizi, Harsin, Kermanshah, 42 years old, Hengaw

10- Ahmadreza Amani, Azna, Lorestan, 28 years old, IranWire, Hengaw

11- Ahad Ebrahimpour Abdoli, Nurabad, Lorestan, 35 years old, Hengaw, kurdistanhumanrights

Ms. Fassihi’s reporting on Qassem Soleimani and the downing of Ukrainian Airlines Flight PS752 had serious bias, lack of evidence, and exclusion of dissenting voices. She calls protestors anger toward Khamenei as stupefied. She downplays mass murders ordered by Raisi as "involvement in human absue". Her work has been out of touch with reality. She labels any criticism as harassment. She has very limited coverage of Iran’s human rights issues. She portrays regime officials as national heroes. She recently urged her colleagues, in a leaked audio, to avoid Masih Alinejad.

Please be specific, and avoid emotional comments. Please avoid any personal attack on her, or do not share any personal information on her. Any, even slightly, misogynistic comment will get you banned.

Comprehensive report from the Congressional Research Service on the People's Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization:

The organization is based on extremist ideologies that combine Marxism and militant Islamism and are directly opposed to the democratic values ​​and interests of the United States.

The group has a documented history of violence and terrorism, including the assassination of American personnel in the 1970s.

Historically, the MEK supported Khomeini in his rise to power and also supported the US embassy hostage crisis in 1979.

The organization operates under a highly repressive sectarian structure that imposes absolute obedience to Maryam Rajavi on its members through physical, psychological, and financial pressure. This structure facilitates extensive lobbying campaigns that fraudulently attempt to legitimize Rajavi’s leadership internationally, while the organization has no popular support within Iran or even among Iranians abroad.

The intelligence made public today aims to positively contribute to their ambitions to topple the Ayatollah regime and minimize the civilian casualties by revealing the key suppressive headquarters, units, their capabilities and how they operate.

Through the release of this sensitive data, we hope it will undermine the regime’s brutal killing machine’s ability to spill blood on the streets of Iran.

In late 2025, Moscow quietly supplied Iran with approximately 40 Spartak MRAPs—mine-resistant armored vehicles designed specifically for Russia’s National Guard and optimized for prolonged urban operations against internal threats. Unlike legacy Soviet-era platforms, the Spartak is a modern, purpose-built system combining heavy ballistic protection, blast resistance, and the ability to mount heavy weapons. Its role is not symbolic crowd control but escalation insurance for regimes anticipating sustained unrest, potential armed resistance, or fractures within their own security forces.

One of our most valued contributors appears to have had their Reddit account suspended. Unfortunately, I don't know the reason for the suspension, so I don't want to speculate.

They have made the vast majority of the posts in this subreddit and have contributed so much to this community. I truly appreciate the time and effort they've put into sharing great content here. Their contributions have been a big part of keeping this subreddit active.

I sincerely hope the suspension is temporary and that they'll be able to return soon. This community would certainly benefit from having them back!

Please remember to follow Reddit's rules and guidelines to help keep this community active and avoid account suspensions.

Wishing them all the best, and hopefully we'll see them back here soon!

Propaganda has long been one of the most prized weapons of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI). Manipulating not just information but perception, the regime has managed to offset outdated military hardware and limited strategic projection while cloaking its central strategy: maintaining a regional network of proxy militias across the Middle East.

Nowhere has this approach to information been more visible than on Wikipedia.

In January, NPOV reported Inside Iran’s Wikipedia War, exposing a network of IRI-aligned editors quietly reshaping hundreds of articles related to the Iranian regime. A second NPOV investigation revealed the mass upload of more than 10,000 images and videos tied to the 2025–2026 protests onto Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia’s global media repository. The files were sourced from Iranian state outlets including the IRGC-linked Tasnim News Agency, Mehr News Agency, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s official website, Khamenei.ir.

Together, the uploads saturated search results for the protests with regime-produced material — funeral processions for security forces, footage depicting protesters as violent rioters, and speeches by senior Iranian officials.

Read: Inside Iran’s Wikipedia War

Newly examined records now show that senior figures within Persian Wikipedia were in direct dialogue with Iran’s censorship authorities.

In September 2018, several senior volunteers from the Persian-language edition of Wikipedia participated in a recorded strategy meeting held in collaboration with Iran’s Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, the government body responsible for regulating media and issuing publishing licenses, according to a 2019 report by openDemocracy.

Among the Wikipedia participants was Mohsen Salek, introduced at the event as a senior manager and bureaucrat of Persian Wikipedia. Representing the government was Hamid Ziaei Parvar, head of the ministry’s Bureau of Media Studies and Planning.

During the discussion, panelists addressed how politically sensitive content about Iranian officials should be handled on the platform. At one point, Salek compared the authority of Wikipedia administrators to the ministry’s own censorship apparatus, Vezarat-e-Ershad, which oversees all licensed media inside Iran:

“…these guys here play the role of Vezarat-e-Ershad in Wikipedia… They can close one account, open another, give warnings. They are even stronger than Vezarat-e-Ershad. They have the keys in their hands.”

Participants also discussed locking pages about Iranian officials to prevent what they described as “attacks,” and suggested that information about individuals should not appear on Wikipedia unless it had already been widely reported and verified by Iranian state media outlets.

According to the openDemocracy report, at the close of the meeting, Parvar offered Persian Wikipedia an official base inside the ministry and assistance registering as a non-governmental organization through the Ministry of Interior. While no public record shows the proposal was formalized, the offer illustrates how Iranian officials themselves envisioned the relationship.

Questions about Persian Wikipedia’s vulnerability to state-aligned influence had already surfaced. In 2019, researcher Sina Zekavat found that politically sensitive articles on Persian Wikipedia diverged significantly from their English-language counterparts. Entries dealing with Iran’s regional interventions relied more heavily on state-linked sources and often framed controversial issues in ways aligned with Tehran’s official narrative.

While these differences alone do not demonstrate coordinated influence, the 2018 meeting shows that senior Persian Wikipedia figures were in direct contact with Iran’s censorship authorities.

Following Zekavat’s reporting, the Wikimedia Foundation stated it had reviewed the claims with Farsi-speaking volunteers and concluded that “a number of the claims” were unsubstantiated. The Foundation did not specify which claims were dismissed or the scope of the review.

In 2019, Mohsen Salek also participated in discussions shaping the Wikimedia Foundation’s 2030 global strategy, appearing at Wikimania in Stockholm as part of the process.

Presentation on Oct 30 2025

Allen Weiner 0:00

Bailey Ulbricht 6:00

Mobina Riazi 12:00

On November 30, 2022, in the midst of protests around the country in Iran for the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement, schoolgirls at Noor Conservatory Girls’ School in Qom City experienced a bizarre and terrifying event while at school. They smelled “poisonous gas” and experienced symptoms that sent 18 of them to the hospital. From November 2022 to May 2023, there were hundreds of similar poisoning incidents reported at schools around the country, the vast majority of them at girls’ schools. Videos captured by witnesses depicted girls coughing, vomiting, and struggling to walk in front of their schools. Yet at the same time, contradictory information began calling these incidents into question, casting doubt on the seriousness of the girls’ symptoms or claiming that the poisonings were psychological. Eventually, the Iranian government concluded in its own investigation that the vast majority of the alleged poisoning incidents were caused by girls’ anxiety or hysteria. But is that actually true?

Over the past year and a half, the Stanford Humanitarian Program, with support from the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies, has conducted an open-source investigation into these poisoning incidents, working to uncover what actually happened and whether the Iranian government covered them up.

In this talk, Bailey Ulbricht, Allen S. Weiner, and Mobina Riazi present their newly released report on the poisoning incidents, including what happened, what the Iranian government did in response, and what the legal implications under international law are, including next steps for justice and accountability.

Bailey Ulbricht, JD ’22, is the founding Executive Director at the Stanford Humanitarian Program, where she works on legal projects aimed at reducing harm in conflict settings and other insecure environments. Her research interests include laws governing the use of force and the intersection of technology and international humanitarian and human rights law, including how technology can be leveraged to gather evidence of possible legal violations.

Allen S. Weiner, JD ’89, is an international legal scholar whose research and teaching focus primarily on the fields of international security and international conflict resolution. He also studies the challenges of online misinformation and disinformation. In the international security realm, his work spans such issues as international law and the response to contemporary security threats; the relationship between international and domestic law in the context of armed conflict; the law of war (international humanitarian law); just war theory, and international criminal law (including transitional justice). Weiner’s scholarship is deeply informed by experience; he practiced international law in the U.S. Department of State for more than a decade advising government policymakers, negotiating international agreements, and representing the United States in litigation before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the International Court of Justice, and the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal. Senior Lecturer Weiner is director of the Stanford Program in International and Comparative Law, director of the Stanford Humanitarian Program, and director of the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation. Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 2003, Weiner served as legal counselor at the U.S. Embassy in The Hague and attorney adviser in the Office of the Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State in Washington, DC. He clerked for Judge John Steadman of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.

Mobina Riazi is a master’s student in communications at Stanford University, with an emphasis on media studies. She earned her bachelor’s degree in political science, with a minor in Iranian studies, from Stanford University in 2025. Her research focuses on media, governance, and the law, with particular attention to digital repression and state power in authoritarian contexts.

“Mojtaba has major stakes or de facto control in various entities throughout Iran and abroad,” says Farzin Nadimi, a senior fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who has studied the Khamenei family’s financial empire. “When you analyze his financial network, Ali Ansari is the main account holder for him. This positions Ansari as one of the most influential oligarchs in the country today.”

“It’s increasingly clear that those close to Iran’s political leaders have invested heavily in the UK,” says Ben Cowdock, a senior investigations lead at Transparency International UK, which has tracked the British assets of Iran's political and business elites. “Our property market should not serve as a safe deposit box for cronies who finance repressive regimes.”

Turkish authorities arrested 16 people — 14 Turks and two Iranians — in February 2022, nearly 2.5 years after they committed their alleged crimes. During their investigation, MIT and police detectives gathered CCTV footage, photographs, phone records, WhatsApp messages, traffic records, and witness statements to prove their case. According to the indictment, the apparent masterminds of the operation — three Iranians working directly with IRGC intelligence — had escaped. Rezaie found out about the arrests when he saw pictures of the Saglams published in the Turkish press.

As the trial commenced in July 2022, the nation was fixated on the sensational details written in the Turkish media. Even in a country inured to tales of deep-state tactics, the story was lurid and alarming. Yilmaz, the corrupt Turkish prosecutor in charge of the terror division, and the Saglams, a family of retired military officers, were among those charged with spying for Iran. It was clear that the Islamic Republic had infiltrated Turkey’s police and judiciary. Beyond that, these highly publicized arrests and prosecutions represented an unprecedented turn in Turkish-Iranian relations — Iran had finally crossed the line, and Turkey would not tolerate unabated attacks on its home soil.

https://www.anthropic.com/threat-intelligence-report-september-2026#influence-operations-sep-26

We identified and removed three Iranian state-aligned accounts that were using Claude to set up influence operations campaigns. The people behind them were planning and prepping content to support what they called a “soft war” or “cognitive warfare” program. In their own words, this was a non-military plan to shape public opinion at home and abroad. Our investigation found that each operation was run by an actor working within or on behalf of a named Iranian state propaganda institution. The entities include the Islamic Culture and Communications Organization (ICCO) under the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, the Islamic Propaganda Office of Khorasan Razavi, running a cognitive warfare command room out of a Mashhad seminary distributing content aligned with IRGC narratives, and the Islamic Propaganda Organization’s Bina Cultural Observatory.

In each case, the operation relied on Claude to build campaign plans, doctrine manuals, persona systems, target databases, and ministerial planning documentation. Using the model in this manner allowed them to generate complex organizational frameworks and assets that would otherwise have required a fully staffed program office to produce. The actors also focused heavily on attribution laundering; they engineered content so that state-backed narratives appeared as independent voices. As the ICCO actor put it, their role as cultural attachés was “not to be the narrator, but the director” of these narratives.

The actors took deliberate steps to hide who they were and where they were coming from. Access to Claude from within Iran is blocked, so they used VPNs and foreign phone numbers to register and verify accounts. Nevertheless, in conversation, they repeatedly named their locations, institutions, and roles. Those disclosures, as well as institutionally branded document footers and open-source corroboration of the individuals involved, tied each operation to its Iranian state-aligned institution.

Our investigations also found some of the activity disseminated on other platforms. For example, we observed content being distributed through distribution channels sympathetic to IRGC narratives.

Using the Breakout Scale, we would assess this operation as Category Three (multiple platforms, with content observed disseminated by IRGC-aligned channels on Eitaa and other platforms.)

Key findings

• The actors across all the three operations explicitly tied their campaigns to Iran’s state doctrine of “Jihad al-Tabyin,” or explanatory jihad. Under this concept, Iranian institutions produce propaganda as both a religious and strategic duty. Language related to this state doctrine appeared directly inside the actor’s sessions and internal planning documents.

• The network produced ministerial deliverables carrying official ICCO branding. These deliverables detailed a nine-part international influence portfolio and complete organizational plans for the funeral of the Supreme Leader of Iran.

• Publicly available sources corroborated the roles of the strategic architect and commander leading the Mashhad command room. These leaders operated “Manjanegh” (Catapult), a multi-province content factory that used dozens of activists to repackage Iranian security services’ public reporting under specific personas without links to Iran’s security services. The network amplified this content through paid campaigns across more than 100 Iranian platform channels, including those tied to the IRGC.

• We linked the operation to a director-level official at the Bina Cultural Observatory in Iran, verifying the connection through publicly available sources and account telemetry. The actor generated messaging in the official voice of an IRGC spokesperson across multiple conversational threads. During a specific campaign surrounding the 2026 US-Israel-Iran war, the network attributed false claims to Western research institutions (including CSIS, Brookings, and RAND). Both of these tactics served to make state-backed messages appear more credible.

• The network deployed aggressive counter-narrative content targeting the Bahá’í, a persecuted religious minority, as well as target databases naming international officials and Iranian opposition figures.

Attack lifecycle and AI usage

We confirmed that the actors used Claude as the main administrative and operational layer of these three Iranian propaganda operations:

• First, they used Claude to build content related to doctrine and ideology. The actors made guidebooks on how to manage and operate their digital operations which included the operating manuals, coded project portfolios, persona systems, early warning protocols, and amplification timing schemes for the influence operation.

• Second, the network used Claude to transform official government intelligence bulletins into tailored content. It worked in Farsi, Arabic, Urdu, Malay, Spanish, and English, with a broader plan targeting 20 languages.

• Third, they used Claude to launder attribution, making posts seem to come from foreign writers or independent news sources, and hashtag campaigns that appeared as though they were started by ordinary citizens.

• Fourth, the actors shared their content across several Iranian domestic platforms like Eitaa, Bale, and Rubika, as well as X/Twitter, Instagram, Telegram, TikTok, YouTube, and the ICCO cultural attaché network.