Azam thought she was leaving political repression behind when, in 2018, she crossed the border into Turkey with the help of a smuggler. Fleeing Iran and a three-year prison sentence for activism, she and her daughter first settled in Eskisehir before claiming refugee status in Canada. But thousands of miles away, Azam — who asked that her full name not be used to protect her identity — continued criticizing her home country, and the Iranian government continued its targeted intimidation of her. Every day, she confronts online harassment and must choose whether to continue her work in the face of abuse.
The Iranian state has long targeted dissidents abroad, but increasingly — empowered through various digital platforms — it is using gendered attacks to intimidate Iranian women who are critical of the government’s actions. It’s a playbook many authoritarian regimes around the globe are now using, as artificial intelligence and other developing technologies provide them with new tools to perpetrate abuse.
Transnational repression by rogue states that harass and intimidate exiled dissidents has increasingly entered the public discourse. Stories of alleged brazen kidnappings by Rwanda and Iran have made headlines years after the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Less scrutinized, however, are the online attacks such states use specifically against female critics. In Iran, where much of the protest movement following the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini has remained women-led, this online harassment is well organized and underpinned by patriarchal ideology.
“When I was in Iran, I received hate in another way,” says Azam. “And when I came to Canada, the strategy was changed.” In 2017, Azam was arrested in Tehran for publicly removing her hijab in an act of protest against the Iranian government’s restrictions on women’s rights. She was sentenced to three years in prison and lost custody of her daughter, prompting her to flee the country. Now settled in Toronto, she is an active critic of the regime on multiple social media platforms and has thousands of followers. “You’re fighting with [patriarchal] culture, you’re fighting with government. You can’t imagine the cyberarmy of the Islamic Republic’s attacks on me. Oh my god, I receive lots of hate,” says Azam. “When you are a woman, it’s different.”
While repressive regimes attack dissidents regardless of gender, recent technological developments have provided those regimes with more insidious ways of targeting female journalists and activists. Such harassment can take the form of spreading rumors about their sexuality, as well as rape threats and reputational smears that extend to victims’ families. Deepfake pornography — where images of targeted women are edited into preexisting or AI-generated sexually explicit content — is also a regular feature of this digital abuse. The number of deepfakes circulating on online platforms has grown since the recent rise of generative AI. In response to her political posts, Azam regularly receives explicit deepfake photos of herself, false claims that she is a sex worker and threats of sexual assault.
“This regime, one of its fundamental policies that it considers to be essential to its survival is transnational repression,” says Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran. “Now, digitally, it’s unfortunately very widespread. It’s constantly getting worse because they are investing more in it.”
Ghaemi explains that, like Russia — another major actor in global foreign interference — Iran’s intelligence agencies recruit from the country’s premier technical universities and offer lucrative salaries. These tech centers then orchestrate phishing schemes, malware attacks, online trolling campaigns and, more recently, “quishing” (phishing using QR codes). State-sponsored hackers have even impersonated human rights organizations, tech companies or other activists to lure their targets into a false sense of security. Ghaemi estimates that thousands of Iranians within the diaspora are being targeted.
A 2024 report by Citizen Lab, the cybersecurity research organization affiliated with the University of Toronto, examined gender-based digital transnational repression by interviewing 85 women from 24 countries — including Iran. Senior researcher and co-lead of the digital transnational repression project, Noura Aljizawi, has herself experienced such online harassment — including being trolled with deepfake porn — for her activism against the Assad regime in her home country of Syria. And when interviewees expressed fatigue with self-policing harmful social media posts, she could commiserate with them. “It feels draining, even just scrolling down and reporting,” says Aljizawi. “When you have to read through content and report, click on reporting, and then you have to choose why it’s harmful, although it’s very obvious that it’s harmful.”
Samaneh, whose full name is also being withheld to conceal her identity, is one of those activists navigating social media hate in her daily life. She grew up in Tehran and came to the U.K. for university. She eventually settled there, where she met her partner and decided to raise her children. At 40, she is the only member of her family residing outside Iran. Samaneh has been working as a feminist activist for seven years and runs a nonprofit. She mainly uses Instagram and X. She has hundreds of thousands of followers and attributes the online abuse she receives to the fact that being an outspoken women’s rights advocate strikes at the core of the Iranian regime, which has built legal and “moral” authority to subjugate women and deny them equal rights.
One day in February 2023, Samaneh opened her Instagram account to find a voice note in her direct messages. She opened it and listened as a man’s voice thanked her for her activism and then laughed and made farting noises. She then scrolled down and saw hundreds of voice notes. She listened as both male and female voices repeated the same message and crude noises.
While these messages may initially seem childish and benign, they had an effect. “When you know 100 people somewhere are talking about you and designing to come and hurt you — it’s just like, wow,” says Samaneh. When she first received these voice notes, she deliberately didn’t talk about the incident. She wanted those who had left the messages to think that she hadn’t bothered to open them, let alone been affected by what they contained. “You do not want them to know that they succeeded in hurting you,” says Samaneh. “On the other hand, you want to stop it.” She believes it was an organized campaign. To this day, she does not open unknown voice notes.
Samaneh points to a proliferation of profiles on Instagram in which Gen-Z Iranian women who are not wearing hijabs spout pro-regime lines, such as women not needing the right to divorce. She believes these are accounts run with government support and credits these alleged fake profiles with fostering an environment where it is more acceptable to attack voices like hers — voices that could be viewed as enemies of the state or hostile to the idea of the traditional family.
She has also experienced online harassment in other, deeply personal ways. Her image has been criticized and briefly trended as shorthand for an insult online. She has received threats of sexual assault. Her home address has been leaked online, and attacks against her have also publicly degraded various family members. She has no plans to return to Iran, fearing arrest were she to return. She has missed both her father’s and her brother’s funerals. She says that she can tolerate disagreement with her views, but when online trolls come for her family, she worries that she can’t protect them. And even within the Iranian dissident communities, the response to this harassment has been fractured. Samaneh has found that male political activists frequently insist on characterizing online harassment as the same across gender lines. “Have they ever threatened you with rape? No. The amount of violence that women face is just very different,” she says. “I do not accept this to be normalized and to be framed as a normal package of activism or being outspoken.”
Unfortunately, Citizen Lab’s findings suggest that Samaneh and Azam’s experiences are common among Iranian women who defend human rights. For Aljizawi, a key finding from the Citizen Lab investigation is the many ways that women are impacted by these gendered online threats. Female critics of the Iranian government who have gone abroad, many of them as migrants or asylum-seekers without the rights of full citizenship, are also often socially and economically vulnerable in their host countries.
Iranian communities at home and internationally often respond to digital attacks on female Iranian activists with misogyny, further stigmatizing these women. Aljizawi notes that when men are targeted through transnational repression they are often valorized, unlike women who are often shamed after being singled out for this treatment. “That’s really putting these activists under siege from everybody around them,” says Aljizawi. “The state as the supreme power committing all of these violations, but also they are not receiving the same social support, when they are involved in this activism as well as when they become the victims.”
One organization keenly aware of Iran’s digital footprint is Miaan Group, a nongovernmental organization that supports Iranian activists both at home and abroad. Their 2025 report assessing cyberattacks and other rights violations in the second half of 2024 found that the U.S., U.K., France, Sweden and Turkey had the highest numbers of reported transnational repression cases. Across genders, ethnic minority rights activists accounted for the highest percentage of cases (21.5%) brought to the organization’s digital security help desk. Feminist activists accounted for over 10% of its cases during this period.
On Instagram, Samaneh has also had her posts shadow banned, a practice that keeps a user’s profile and posts significantly less visible on the platform. In Samaneh’s case, her 200,000 followers suddenly spiked to 400,000 in the early 2020s, but the bulk of those were Russian and Indian accounts that Instagram had flagged as likely bots. As a result of the influx, Samaneh’s posts — written in Farsi — were not reaching their Iranian audience but being shown in the feeds of Russian and Indian users who could not understand the content. Other Iranian feminists were experiencing similar spikes in suspect Instagram followers. Samaneh says that the affected activists reached out to Meta and befriended several Iranian staff who took their concerns seriously (the staff declined to comment for the Citizen Lab report). In 2023, Meta announced changes that would allow users to screen flagged followers on Instagram.
But if such an incident happened today, it is unlikely that the major tech companies would be responsive. Last month, Meta announced that it would stop using third-party fact-checking on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, a move aligned with U.S. President Donald Trump’s calls for unfettered free speech across social media. Elon Musk’s X uses crowdsourced corrections rather than independent fact-checkers, and many media watchdogs consider this ineffective at stopping the spread of misinformation on the platform.
Even when her home address was revealed online, Samaneh did not turn to the U.K. police. Amir Rashidi, Miaan’s director of digital rights and security, understands why victims of digital transnational repression often don’t seek help from local authorities. “It’s a private company and law enforcement cannot do a lot. It’s mainly on the social media company to take care of this content,” Rashidi says. “Most of the time, it goes under their freedom of speech.” Rashidi describes X under Musk as “horrible” for digital harassment and suspects Instagram will soon be the same. Each month, hundreds of Iranians seek assistance from Miaan Group’s help desk after they experience malware and phishing attacks and digital trolling. “All of these companies, they need to realize this is a real issue,” Rashidi says. They need to understand the real consequence of this kind of content for marginalized groups — females, because most of the time, females are the targets.”
The countries where dissidents have sought refuge are also grappling with how to handle transnational repression, digital or otherwise. NGOs such as Citizen Lab and Freedom House, as well as parliamentary taskforces and committees from Canada, the U.K. and Australia, have urged host countries to be more proactive in tackling this issue.
But targeting Iran is complicated. Iran is economically and politically isolated, with many countries opting not to have diplomatic relations with the Iranian regime. Nahid Naghshbandi, an Iran researcher at Human Rights Watch, maintains that there need to be more diplomatic ways to hold Iran accountable. “They already sanctioned Iran as much as possible,” she says. Naghshbandi explains that there are so many allegations of physical transnational repression by the Iranian regime — including kidnapping plots, intimidation and surveillance — that digital harassment is often underprioritized.
Unlike legal pioneer South Korea, Canada currently lacks legislation governing digital deepfakes, as does the EU. The U.S. has a patchwork of different laws that vary state by state, with several states having no legislation on the issue. Last year, Australia passed legislation criminalizing the nonconsensual sharing of such content, and the U.K. government has recently announced plans to criminalize creating or sharing this material.
Even if countries can find ways to legislate deepfakes and provide redress for victims, deepfake creators often operate in opaque online environments. The marketplace MrDeepFakes is a major hub for deepfake pornography content — the open source investigative network Bellingcat found that the site contains tens of thousands of images and videos and is visited by millions each month — and yet its administrators have carefully masked their identities. In addition, it shifts the location of its host providers and employs payment systems, including cryptocurrency, that allow users to obscure their identities.
The decentralized nature of many attacks also makes it harder for activists and host governments to fight back. Attacks can come from loyalist diaspora groups, state-supportive media outlets, government-adjacent trolls and even criminal organizations. A 2024 report published by the digital security arm of Miaan found that the Islamic Republic appears to use a network of Telegram channels to target anti-government activists and spread disinformation, while also promoting sexual violence. The channels lure individuals seeking child pornography and then intersperse sexually graphic and harmful content with pro-government disinformation and rallying calls to harass regime critics, leaking their personal contact information. “The Islamic Republic or a state actor is using this kind of method to mobilize a group of people — make an army of [a] group of people — who are not necessary on the payroll, but they are willing to do something for the state actor to receive child pornography,” says Rashidi.
For the activists, this amorphous and relentless harassment has taken an enormous toll. But despite taking breaks from social media, it hasn’t ultimately pushed them into silence. Azam regularly blocks and mutes those who target her. She has had problems sleeping and has needed to take time away from being online. Yet she says she is now resigned to the trolling as part of her life as an activist. In 2022, Azam contacted the Ontario Provincial Police after receiving death threats on X from accounts in Iran. The police gave her a number to call if she felt unsafe. The Ontario Police did not respond to interview requests for this story.
“For me, the abuse is nothing right now. I will continue to fight,” says Azam. When she considers the situation of women on the ground in Iran, she feels compelled to continue in spite of the attacks.
But there is always the threat of digital transnational repression sparking actions beyond the online sphere. And Samaneh is now confronting this scenario. She was successfully able to renew her Iranian passport while living in the U.K. — until last year, when the Iranian Consulate, without explanation, denied her request to extend it. She would like to apply for U.K. citizenship, but one of the required documents is a valid passport from the applicant’s home country. While Samaneh has reached out to a lawyer to navigate this situation, she has not had a valid passport or been able to travel for seven months. The Iranian Consulate in the U.K. did not respond to interview requests for this story.
After a particularly vicious attack exposing the online profile of her ill brother early last year, Samaneh started to spend less and less time online. And then a few months ago she began to post again. “I should take back my online space. I wasn’t happy with not being there,” she says. “And now suddenly, I’m everywhere. I’m trying to inspire more women like myself, we should take this back.”
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