While companies like Instagram and Facebook allow top Iranian mullahs to spread propaganda in the West, anti-regime protesters report that their access to the social media sites are being censored.  

Dire economic conditions in Iran, resulting mostly from government incompetence, have beefed up the ranks of regime opponents in the country and among Iranians abroad. What started as angry street protests against the government’s handling of the economy has gelled into outright defiance of the Islamic Republic, its leaders, and its enforcers. 

Yet, when a Germany-based Persian-language reporter freelancing for the British Broadcasting Corporation and other media outlets, Bamdad Esmaili, published protest scenes from Iran recently on his Instagram account, some posts were removed from the site.

One of three postings that mysteriously disappeared, Mr. Esmaili told the Sun, was a video showing Revolutionary Guard enforcers beating up street protesters. Another was a photo of a protest sign that read “Death to Khamenei.” A third posting was “just normal reporting about street violence against the people,” Mr. Esmaili said. 

Further, Mr. Esmaili, who has 155,000 followers on Instagram, said he “found out that some of my friends couldn’t find me on Instagram. When they searched my name, it didn’t come up.”

The parent company of Facebook and Instagram, Meta, denied allegations that it is acting under the influence of the Iranian regime. The company’s “rules are very strict and it carefully monitors the performance of its employees,” a Meta spokesperson told the BBC’s Persian service. 

Yet, America’s most well known anti-regime activist, Masih Alinejad, tweeted this morning that “it looks as if Islamic Republic agents have infiltrated Facebook and Instagram.”

Ms. Alinejad told the Sun that she had a similar experience to Mr. Esmaili’s earlier this year. Friends contacted her to say that her Facebook account was undiscoverable by a simple search. “I was wondering how come, with 6 million followers, people couldn’t find my name,” she told the Sun.

After she wrote an email to Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, the situation was resolved and friends once again said they could find her account easily, Ms. Alinejad said. 

Widely followed in Iran, Ms. Alinejad became well known in America after the FBI discovered a plot by the Iranian regime to kidnap her last year. The Brooklyn-based journalist, who posts videos of Iranians defying a dictate forcing women to wear head covering in public, has been a thorn at the side of the mullahs for years.

When Ms. Alinejad took to Instagram and Facebook to praise the killing of a Revolutionary Guard terrorist, Qassam Soleimani, her post mysteriously disappeared. After she complained, it was reinstated, but reposts by many of her followers did not show up. Realizing that other regime opponents may not have similar access to company bigwigs, Ms. Alinejad went public last night, appealing via Twitter to the social media moguls. 

“F— all the tech companies that remove videos of Iranian people who get killed in the streets right now,” Ms Alinejad tweeted. “How come you don’t remove our government from social media who shutdown the internet to kill protesters? This is not called freedom of speech. You’re helping our killers.”

The Islamic Republic’s top mullahs maintain accounts with American-based media companies even as they ban the use of social media inside Iran. Postings by the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and other ayatollahs that denigrate America and call for erasing Israel off the map are rarely censored on the media sites. 

In several Iranian cities where the protests have been most intense, access to the internet is now cut off by the regime’s enforcers. While the mullahs deprive Iranians of access at home, they get to use social media to spread their message abroad. 

Twitter’s founder, Jack Dorsey, at one point explained that the company allows the ayatollahs to use the site because they are “just saber rattling” and they pose no real threat, but Ms. Alinejad says, “I replied, for you maybe they are not a real threat. For us they certainly are.” 

A spokesman for Meta, Ryan Moore, did not immediately respond to a Sun request for comment.