The Harassment of Iranian Dissidents on Instagram

The final speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Simin Kargar, whose focus is on the harassment of civil society actors on the Iranian Internet. Such harassment and suppression has a long history in Iran, and is affected by shifts in the availability and popularity of platforms – Simin and her colleagues interviewed a range of actors (journalists, media producers, activists, ...), in Iran and the international diaspora, to explore these issues.

Diasporic civil society members were disproportionately targetted; gender is a particular component of vulnerability, and the abuse of family members still in Iran is a prominent tool for harassment. Recently, Instagram has emerged as a particularly contested space, as the platform is not yet blocked in Iran.

The project sifted through the Instagram posts and subsequent comments for 12 profiles by the civil society actors it interviewed; within this, it identified some 60 topics including political hate speech, vulgar language, religious and social debate, and counter-speech aiming to neutralise hate. There was also a temporal dimension here, focussed especially around religious topics.

Within one of the communities detected here, distinct networks of interaction emerged; these were focussed around a range of topics from anti-American sentiments to internal political debates. The other accounts that such users followed ranged from popular culture to political and religious leaders. Many such accounts referenced the Supreme Leader and the Quran; made threats of sexual violence against oppositional users (especially women); and mainly used male names. Some such accounts represented the military, religious users, or political extremism (using fascist and anti-US sentiments).

The most attacked images on Instagram belonged to women, and were often attacked almost instantly after being posted; this is amplified in many cases by coverage in state-owned television. Users also report such images to Instagram, and Instagram sometimes takes down pictures in response to these reports; they are then often restored only after a few days.

All of this shows that Iran has an abundance of online vigilantes who support the regime and seek to silence dissidents. Such harassment is perhaps not as effective as the government would want it to be, but it does directly affect the mental health of the dissidents being attacked. These attacks also show that the AI-based technological solutions suggested by the platforms themselves are likely to be inefficient and can be gamed by the trolls.