Simultaneous with killing dissidents, the Iranian regime has been pursuing a demonizing and disinformation campaign against its political opponents, mainly the MEK and the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI). The regime uses the demonization campaign to:
1- Pave the way and justify further killing and terrorism against the Iranian Resistance’s members and supporters.
2- Discredit its viable alternative and portray this regime as irreplaceable.
3- Encourage the international community to continue the appeasement policy.
In recent years, parallel with the advance of cybertechnology, the regime has been using social media platforms and the internet to further spread disinformation against the MEK and the NCRI. Using hundreds of fake accounts, the regime tries to downplay the Iranian Resistance’s impact on the Iranian society. This is indeed the flip side of the coin of killing protesters on the streets in broad daylight and shutting down internet across the country for days during the nationwide Iran protests in 2019.
The NCRI recently held its annual “Free Iran Global Summit,” virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic, connecting some 30,000 locations from more than 100 countries together. Infuriated over the vast political and social support this event received, the Iranian regime launched a coordinated attack on several websites affiliated to the Iranian Resistance, including: Mojahedin.org and Iranntv.com, the MEK’s Farsi website and Iranian opposition’s television network website, respectively. Both of these websites were live-streaming the “Free Iran Global Summit.” the Iranian regime even tried to hack a web service provider to redirect queries to MEK-affiliated websites to other locations.
In this regard, the MEK wrote on its website: “Despite the regime’s efforts, the Free Iran online event was widely viewed and discussed on the internet. According to a Google report, during the event, there was a 1,000% increase in search about the MEK in Farsi and English, which attests to the regime’s failure to shut down the voice of freedom and democracy in Iran.”
