Meta and Twitter stand behind the Iranian oppressor regime to silent #MahsaAmini’s movement.
Regardless of where you live, you probably have heard about the massacre currently happening in Iran, following Mahsa Amini’s murder by Iran’s Morality Police and the nationwide protests.
Despite global support from politicians, artists, athletes and other public figures who demand basic human rights for Iranian women, some tech giants have decided to take another route.
These tools supposedly allow people to connect and raise their voices when they need the world to hear them, like what we saw in #BlackLivesMatter, #UkrainInvaision, and many more movements in recent years.
In this post, I show you how Meta and Twitter — whose existence is based on the promise of connecting people and spreading the voices — are throwing a spanner in the works when it comes to the libertarian movement in Iran.
Since the first days of the protests, Some Instagram users have announced that their posts, stories, and reels about the movement had been taken down without proper explanations. I reviewed over a few hundred removed posts and stories, and none were against Instagram policies.
This is not the first time suspicion has arisen against Instagram and Meta. More evidence can easily be found online by simply googling “Iran bribes Instagram moderators.”
A Persian-language content moderator for Instagram and a former content moderator have said Iranian intelligence officials offered them money to remove Instagram accounts of journalists and activists.
“I was offered 5,000 to 10,000 euros to delete an account. They were especially after removing Masih Alinejad,” the former reviewer told BBC Persian.
On September 21, “Manoto”, one of the most popular Iranian TV networks with 10 million followers, became the target. Almost all protest-related posts were removed, and admins were restricted from posting anything for a few hours. [Source]
During the first few days of the protests in Iran, concurrent with the government’s nationwide internet blockage, ALL WhatsApp accounts associated with an Iranian phone number (+98) lost their connectivity to WhatsApp servers, even those outside Iran! Some examples can be found here.
What could it means when thousands of people on five continents of the world cannot connect to WhatsApp with their Iranian accounts? However, when they switch to their local accounts, everything is working as usual. Is this a coincidence that this happened exactly when the government decided to shut down the internet? Or maybe there is more to it!
Twitter is by far the most influential social network during historical events, and it’s proven by playing its role in many world-changing movements, which usually happen in the form of a trending hashtag, from #MeToo to #BlackLivesMatter. The latter was one of the largest Twitter trends, with over 41 million tweets.
To distinguish the trending hashtags and prevent trolls from hijacking them with fake (similar but incorrect) hashtags, Twitter usually sets a “hashflag” to them.
Despite more than 150,000,000 (and counting) tweets with #مهساـامینی hashtag -which makes it the largest Twitter trend ever-, hundreds of fake hashtags created by government trolls and multiple requests for a hashflag since seven days ago, Twitter neither provided a hashflag nor a response!
You can read the whole thread here. Multiple Iranian activists also directly contacted Twitter executives via email; the emails opened, but there was no response. They also signed a petition, which didn’t help.
And this is how we ended up… People built it themselves!
These companies should and will be held accountable for where they choose to stand.
