Just the night before, he had posted on Truth Social about the impending execution of these women, quoting a screenshot that included a collage of eight glamorous backlit, soft-focus portraits. The women’s photos were immediately accused of being AI-generated. One viral X post said, “Trump is pleading Iranian leaders not to execute 8 AI-generated women. This is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Furthermore, almost immediately after Trump’s announcement, Iranian state news agency Mizan called the president a liar. “Last night, Donald Trump called on Iran to overturn the death sentences of eight women, citing a completely false news report.” Mizan said that some of the women had already been released and others were facing prison sentences but not execution, and furthermore he said that Tehran had not made any concessions – presumably, resulting in no change in the women’s situation.
The Iranian Embassy in South Africa’s
Mahsa Alimardani, associate director of the Technology Threats and Opportunities program at Witness, said the collage Trump posted was, at the very least, AI-altered. The Verge. But women themselves are real. The woman in the top right corner of the collage is Beata Hemmati, whose photo appeared in several stories in various right-wing news outlets last week. Hemmati has been confirmed to have received the death penalty by Branch 26 of the Tehran Revolutionary Court for “operational actions against a government and groups hostile to the United States.”
Alimardani named six women (Beita Hemmati, Mahboubeh Shabani, Venus Hossein-Nejad, Golnaz Naraghi, Diana Taherabadi, Ghazal Ghalandri) and said that the identities of the last two (Panah Movahedi and Ensih Nejati) were still unverified. Six verified women took part in protests against the government in January. Apart from Hemmati, no other women are reported to have received the death penalty.
It is not surprising that Trump has a reckless disregard for the truth; It is not surprising that the Iranian regime would manipulate the details to suit its narrative, or highlight actual political prisoners in order to shift blame to the United States.
The additional complaint is that the account mocking Trump for coming to the defense of “8 AI-generated women” is the same account that got South Korean President Lee Jae-myung into trouble when he quoted a mislabeled video posted by that account. Israeli officials have accused the account of being “known for spreading misinformation”. The sketchy Lee Jae-myung quote-post affair is a tale of mixed truth and misinformation, where the post greatly misstated the facts, but the video – of Israeli Defense Forces soldiers pushing a limp body off a rooftop in Gaza – was real, documenting an incident that potentially implicates Israeli forces in violation of international law.
In the case of the eight Iranian protesters, the same mixture of fact and fiction has turned into a blurry distortion that fuels endless controversy over actual human rights violations. Their lives have become limited to shiny pixels and quote-dunks, propaganda and parody content. While known liars fight each other on the Internet over who these women are and what will happen to them, they – six of them, at least – remain real people who exist beyond the Iranian internet blackout.
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