Iranians flood social media in attempt to halt state executions
IRANIANS have flooded social media to demand that authorities halt executions in an unprecedented online outcry against capital punishment after recent death sentences.
On Tuesday, after a judicial spokesman confirmed three young men are now on death row for violent offences related to the growing protest movement, Iranians rallied around the Farsilanguage hashtag “don’t execute” to demand clemency.
Among the thousands to support the hashtag were scores of anonymous users but also celebrities and prominent figures including former member of parliament Parvaneh Salahshouri.
“Let’s not forget that those three men have mothers as well,” she tweeted yesterday, in response to a new MP who had posted about having a baby.
The three condemned men, Amirhossein Moradi, 25, Saeed Tamjidi, 27, and Mohammad Rajabi, 27, were part of protests last November against a rise in petrol prices. Amnesty International criticised their sentencing as unfair, saying they had been tortured.
On Instagram, director Asghar Farhadi shared a photo of the condemned men, with the English tag Stopexecutionsiniran. The Farsi hashtag was used more than two million times on Twitter and more than nine million times on Instagram, according to Shayan Sardarizadeh, a Farsi-speaking journalist for BBC Monitoring who said many of the engagements were made inside Iran.
Netblocks, which tracks internet connectivity, reported significant disruption to service in Iran on Tuesday night, which some interpreted as a sign authorities were seeking to block access.
Authorities carried out three executions on Tuesday, including a former defence ministry worker accused of being a CIA spy and two Kurdish prisoners convicted of bombing a military parade. Iran puts more people to death than any country bar China, and last week killed a man for drinking alcohol.
Some Iranians interpreted recent executions as a message against dissent as authorities fear another outbreak of protests. “The judiciary has been handing out outrageous sentences,” said an Iranian journalist in Tehran, noting that authorities have “a history of using the death penalty to scare people off ”.
Despite it being officially banned, there are an estimated two million Twitter users in Iran, who use virtual private networks to mask their location to access the platform.
As the only major application not banned in Iran, Instagram is by far the country’s biggest social media platform.
Reports of disruption to internet in Iran were seen by some as a sign authorities were seeking to block access