The news was also shared by actors like Viola Davis, Sophie Turner and Florence Pugh (Picture: Chris McGrath/Getty Images)
If you were anywhere on social media this week you might have come across people sharing a post claiming that 15,000 protesters were to be executed in Iran.
The post was shared by a number of celebrities and politicians including Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
‘Canada denounces the Iranian regime’s barbaric decision to impose the death penalty on nearly 15,000 protestors,’ he tweeted from his official account on Monday.
The tweet was deleted twelve hours later but not before it had been retweeted over 6,000 times.
The news was also shared by actors like Viola Davis, Sophie Turner and Florence Pugh.
The post went viral on other platforms including Instagram where it was tagged as ‘false Information’, saying, ‘independent fact-checkers say this information has no basis in fact’.
The viral false post seems to have started when Javaid Rehman, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in Iran, said that ‘over the past six weeks, thousands of men, women, and children – by some accounts over 14,000 persons – have been arrested’.
Two weeks ago, IRNA, Iran’s state-run news agency, reported that a majority of Iran’s parliament had signed an open letter to the country’s judiciary seeking swift and harsh punishment of the detained protesters.
In a report on Monday, citing CNN’s reporting on the open letter, Newsweek erroneously wrote that ‘Iran Votes to Execute Protesters’ without citing any additional reporting to support the claim. This was later corrected.
The fact is that the first known death sentence was issued on Sunday, according to Iran’s Mizan news agency, which added that the ruling is preliminary and can be appealed. So far five protesters have been sentenced to death as reported by Iranian state media.
The incident shows how easily misinformation can spread in the age of social media, prone to being amplified by those in positions of power.
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The news was also shared by Viola Davis, Sophie Turner and Florence Pugh.
