December 16, 2022
Twitterdom was set alight November 14 by false reports that the Islamic Republic had announced it was executing 15,000 people for demonstrating against the regime a fake story that was even repeated by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Twitter account.
The regime made no such announcement. In fact, as of the Twitter flurry, it had just announced its first death sentence stemming from the disorders, issued against a single unnamed man for injuring a Basiji.
The 15,000-figure appeared to have originated with estimates of the number of people thus far arrested for participating in protests.
The first tweets asserting the huge execution total were transmitted by such celebrities as Viola Davis, 57, an African-American actress who has won Oscar, Emmy and Tony awards, Sophie Turner, 26, an English-Canadian actress who gained fame appearing in the TV show “Game of Thrones,” and Peter Frampton, 72, an English singer, songwriter and guitarist.
Davis not only tweeted the false story but also complained that it wasn’t getting much media attention. “Iran is sentencing 15,000+ people to death as a ‘hard lesson’ for all rebels,” she wrote. “How this isn’t getting more coverage right now is beyond me, but that needs to change now!”
She cited a Newsweek article about the Majlis approving harsh penalties for rioters. But 1) the Majlis didn’t call for hanging protesters, just harsh penalties and 2) the 227 Majlis deputies signed a letter calling for harsh penalties; it did not pass legislation ordering them.
The Newsweek article, furthermore, did not say Iran was executing 15,000 people. But its headline said, “Iran protesters refuse to back down as 15,000 face execution” a poor choice of words that could have confused readers, especially those who did not read beyond the headline. The story text itself erroneously said, “The country’s parliament overwhelmingly voted in favor of the death penalty for protesters” but didn’t say it voted to kill all 15,000 arrested.
Frampton also tweeted a complaint that the story of executing 15,000 people was being ignored by the West. “Why isn’t this the lead story worldwide???” he wrote. “It would be a crime against humanity.”
Later that same day, Prime Minister Trudeau’s Twitter account denounced the “Iranian regime’s barbaric decision to impose the death penalty on nearly 15,000 protesters.” The tweet was not taken down until 11 hours later. It wasn’t known if Trudeau knew about the tweet. Around the world, senior officials’ tweets are commonly handled by staff. But there is usually an approval chain that makes sure someone knowledgeable about the subject matter first approves the wording before a tweet is posted.
Trudeau was not in Canada during the Twitter kerfuffle. He was in Indonesia for the G-20 summit.
Oddly, the Islamic Republic, which commonly complains about foreign tweets it dislikes, did not say a word about this chain of patently false tweets.
Joan Donovan, research director of the Harvard Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, told The Guardian, “We get drawn into information that we think is being kept from us, and claims that involve numbers that are completely novel and outrageous do tend to travel very quickly on social media.”
She said: “People who are sharing this particular post about 15,000 people being sentenced to death are trying to do the right thing are trying to stop political oppression from happening but they may not realize that they’re being duped into spreading propaganda that doesn’t reflect the situation of protesters on the ground.”