So she and her colleagues at Persian-language Radio Farda use secure messaging apps to speak with their network of sources inside Iran, who may very well be jailed for talking to the media. They spend hours analyzing videos from Iran to confirm their authenticity. And so they interview the families of protesters who’ve been killed.
“These persons are really risking every little thing to send us videos of the protests,” Esfandiari said. “And so they come speak to us because they trust us, and so they know the state media are never going to present them a platform.”
The protests, sparked by the September death of a Kurdish Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, while within the custody of Iran’s “morality police,” have morphed into some of the sustained challenges to the Islamic republic’s governance in a long time. Authorities have responded harshly; 1000’s of Iranians have been arrested — a minimum of six of them sentenced to death up to now — while tons of have been killed on the road, in response to estimates kept by human rights groups.
Western news organizations have been almost entirely shut in another country by state restrictions and security concerns. Meanwhile, the federal government has arrested greater than 60 Iranian journalists, in response to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Niloofar Hamedi and Elahe Mohammadi, among the many reporters who helped break the story of Amini’s death, were charged with acting as CIA spies, an offense punishable by the death penalty.
However the journalists covering the rebellion from afar have been amazed that, despite the numerous risks, extraordinary people from Iran are still sharing video footage.
“We never have seen it before like this,” said Jiyar Gol, a Kurdish Iranian journalist for the BBC reporting the story from London. “They really need the world to find out about what is happening. People don’t fear anymore.”
Gol established contact with Amini’s family in September and managed to send a contact inside Iran to facilitate an interview along with her father. In a broadcast on BBC Persian, Amjad Amini hotly denied the official state story that his daughter suffered “sudden heart failure” after she was arrested for supposedly failing to wear a hijab in response to the Islamic republic’s rules; he said witnesses told the family that she was beaten.
“He was so brave,” Gol said. “Despite intimidation and threat and the danger of being put in prison, he refused to stay silent, and he talked to us.”
Still, the damaging climate makes it difficult for journalists to capture the scope of the federal government crackdowns, and it makes them unable to independently confirm figures similar to death tolls, having to depend on human rights organizations for much information.
It might take news organizations weeks to nail down details of events in places where their reporters couldn’t travel. As many as 96 people were gunned down by government forces outside a prayer complex within the southeastern Iranian city of Zahedan on Sept. 30, in response to the Latest York Times, an incident that had “been largely concealed from Iranians by a web blackout.” But it surely wasn’t until Oct. 14 that the paper confirmed enough of the incident, through witness testimony and videos, to publish its investigation. The Washington Post and CNN have also published investigations of events that took place weeks prior using similar methods.
Social media has played a vital yet complex role. The first method for people inside Iran to get information out, it has also enabled the spread of false information.
Within the early days of the protests, a video circulated online purportedly showing Kurdish fighters standing guard outside Amini’s family house in Saqqez. It was a scene that might have bolstered the government’s allegations that Kurdish separatists had incited the rebellion.
But Gol called his Kurdish political contacts — and discovered that the video was two years old and had no connection to Amini’s family.
“We realized it was the Revolutionary Guard deliberately spreading those videos,” Gol said. Other media outlets “simply saw it, and so they showed it,” he said. “But we were very cautious.”
When a hearth broke out at Evin prison, notorious for warehousing political dissidents, social media lit up with horrifying reports that some escaping prisoners had emerged into the center of a minefield — a detail that made it into some Western news reports.
But at Radio Farda — a part of the U.S.-funded but independently run Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — Esfandiari and her colleagues contacted prisoners and their families and will find nobody with knowledge of such an escape. She traced the detail back to an Iranian government-aligned news agency known for false reports, then saw a quote in a more reputable news service from a jail official denying the incident.
“You’ve got to read between the lines” of official statements, she said.
Organized disinformation efforts have only muddled the image, said Pouria Nazemi, an Iranian freelance journalist based in Canada. Some phony social media accounts pose as critics of the federal government to advertise false news. People sympathetic to the protests “begin to reshare that [content] in the warmth of the moment,” he said. “The final result is a chaotic situation, with all of the disinformation and misinformation mixed together, and it may very well be very dangerous, because some people inside Iran risk their lives based off of this.”
But there are also “honest mistakes and rumors” that get circulated, said Radio Farda director Kambiz Fattahi. Newsweek erroneously reported earlier this month that 15,000 protesters had been sentenced to death. Fact-checkers later traced the number to an activist news agency’s estimate of the variety of protest arrests, conflated with the news that Iranian lawmakers were pushing a “no leniency” policy toward those detained that might include the death penalty. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted the false information, then later deleted it, which in turn became fodder for Iranian state media to accuse Canada of spreading lies, CNN reported.
The Iranians sending videos of protests and crackdowns in another country have change into increasingly savvy about how one can help others confirm them, adding details similar to time, date and site and providing corroborating images from different angles.
But journalists find the small print they derive from eyewitnesses and citizen reporters as essential as any digital fingerprint, Fattahi said. A video may show a large protest, yet interviews are needed to substantiate the true scope.
“We will’t be within the business of wishful reporting and pondering,” he said, “in order that level of trust and access is vital when it comes to verification.”
Journalists are also mindful to not endanger their tipsters. “Sometimes I don’t contact my sources when something big happens, because I don’t need to create the chance. I don’t want anyone to go to jail due to me,” Esfandiari said. “If there’s something vital, they are going to come to me and speak to me.”
Meanwhile, Iranian journalists working outside the country have been subject to hacking and phishing attempts. In Britain, police have warned of “credible” threats of kidnapping or killing, and the BBC has filed a grievance with the United Nations, saying Iran has been harassing its journalists and their families. The federal government has denied the allegations. When a Radio Farda analyst died in Berlin this 12 months and his body was to be repatriated back to his family in Iran, his mother said his body was as a substitute seized by Iranian security agents.
Despite the difficulties, journalists remain committed to getting the story out to the world.
“We see that individuals are coming to us and trusting us,” Esfandiari said. “They’ve nowhere else to show to, and so they need to be heard. That’s what we do.”
