سیروس مرسل 🇮🇷

A coordinated mass-reporting campaign backed by the Islamist regime in Iran has been targeting Iran-based, anti-regime, pro-Pahlavi accounts on X, leading to their suspension. Many of these accounts are eventually restored, sometimes after days or even months, because the reports against them are baseless. But the damage is already done. Suspensions, especially repeated ones, can completely derail an account’s growth, reach, and ability to communicate. This is a deliberate, coordinated attempt by the regime to manipulate and control the Iran narrative on X. It is essential that @X and @Support investigate this abuse and take action against accounts engaged in systematic, meritless mass reporting of dissidents. This is particularly urgent for dissidents inside Iran. They are risking their lives to tell the world what is happening in their country. They should not also have to fight coordinated efforts by the regime to silence them on X.

To @Support We, Iranian users, firmly and unequivocally protest the widespread and baseless suspension and restriction of Iranian accounts. These suspensions are largely the result of coordinated mass reporting by bots and organizational accounts affiliated with the Islamic Republic regime — a regime widely recognized as repressive and terrorist. While our accounts are suspended over mass reporting, supporters and officials of this same regime — including Ejei, the head of the judiciary — openly threaten Iranians with execution and the harshest punishments on this very platform, yet their accounts remain active and unrestricted. This is a clear and blatant violation of the free speech principles that X claims to uphold. Our situation is not one of freely expressing opinions from a safe environment with unrestricted internet. We connect to X with great difficulty and hardship, using VPNs, at the constant risk of identification. Activity on this platform is life-threatening for us. If we are identified and arrested by the regime’s security apparatus, we face the most severe punishments — ranging from flogging and long prison sentences to execution. Yet by suspending and restricting our accounts, X is doing exactly what the regime wants: silencing the voices of protesters. We call on the X team to: - Take coordinated bot-driven reporting campaigns seriously and review suspensions resulting from them. - End the double standard. If open threats of execution and repression are tolerated on the platform, why are the voices of those targeted by these threats being removed? - Remain faithful to the principle of free speech that you have repeatedly emphasized, and stop systematically sacrificing the accounts of Iranian users who speak at the risk of their lives in the regime’s information warfare. Do not silence our voices. We are being targeted not for violating the rules, but for resisting a repressive regime. If X truly believes in free speech, it must recognize this reality and act accordingly.