Family finds Iranian protester alive among bodies at Kahrizak, Rights group says

Hannah Neumann, a German member of the European Parliament and Chair of its delegation for relations with Iran, said on Tuesday that the Islamic Republic is collapsing.

“People in Iran are back on the streets because of poverty, repression and because they cannot survive like this. The regime responds with brutality beyond comprehension. They deliberately shoot peaceful protestors in the face,” Neumann said in a speech to the parliament's plenary.​

“This regime has lost every last inch of legitimacy. It is politically bankrupt, economically hollow, morally dead. It will fall. The only question is when,” she added. “It is our responsibility to shorten that timeline."

The investigation by UK-based investigative media outlet Neutral Point of View (NPOV), published on Tuesday, said the effort aimed to control how Iranian events were recorded on Wikipedia.

"This is what authoritarian information warfare looks like in 2026," NPOV said.

"The Islamic Republic isn’t just killing protesters. It’s erasing the evidence that they existed at all, it added.

Wikipedia edits and Iran’s rights record

NPOV said Wikipedia entries had been edited over a period years to sanitize Iran’s human rights record. The report cited a 2024 Times investigation that detailed key information about the 1988 mass executions were removed, including references to women and children killed extrajudicially and the involvement of senior officials in the death commissions.

Information about Iranian official Hamid Nouri’s 2022 life sentence in Sweden for war crimes had disappeared from Wikipedia, it added. References to the 2018 expulsion of two Iranian diplomats from Albania over their alleged involvement in a bomb plot against dissidents were also removed.

AI and downstream platforms

NPOV said the impact extended beyond Wikipedia because major platforms drew from Wikipedia content. The report said that when users queried AI systems such as ChatGPT about Iranian leaders or events, the systems often drew from Wikipedia articles that NPOV described as compromised.

NPOV said the narrative did not remain on Wikipedia and instead propagated into downstream products and services trained on or influenced by Wikipedia content, shaping what users saw across the broader information ecosystem.

Editing tactics and coordination

NPOV said the operation exploited Wikipedia’s consensus model through tactics including what it called “abrasive deletion,” in which small edits gradually eroded sections before larger removals were justified as trimming or the removal of trivial material.

The report said editors used “source reliability” disputes as another mechanism. On the “2017–2018 Iranian protests” page, NPOV said editor Mhhossein deleted paragraphs describing conditions inside Iran after the protests ended, citing disputes over whether dissident outlet Iran News Wire was reliable.

NPOV said coordinated groups acted as voting blocs on article Talk Pages, while “authorship dominance” allowed a small number of editors to maintain control over most of an article’s text by reverting challenges.

The report said a Wikipedia arbitration case documented editors citing state-linked outlets including irdiplomacy.ir. It also said the so-called “Gang of 40” controlled more than 90% of dozens of articles.

Key editors named in the report

NPOV said two editors exemplified the campaign.

It said Mhhossein had acted as a gatekeeper on historical coverage, citing his editing of Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's page and other Iran-related topics. NPOV said Mhhossein edited 2,228 pages over more than 11,000 edits.

NPOV said Iskandar323 continued editing sensitive Iran-related atrocity content, including the 1988 mass executions, as recently as Jan. 18. The report said Wikipedia was running a site-ban process against him following years of systematic narrative manipulation, and it detailed his editing history across thousands of pages.

Live battleground: 2025–2026 protest page

NPOV said Wikipedia’s “2025–2026 Iranian protests” article had drawn on more than 400 sources and remained relatively distributed at the time of writing. However, it said the Talk Page showed pressure in real time, including disputes over language and whether opposition figures such as Reza Pahlavi should be included.

NPOV highlighted a newly created account, SwedishDutch, which disputed casualty figures and challenged the reliability of outlets including The Sunday Times and Iran International, before the account was deleted hours later.

“What we are seeing in Iran is a revolution that will change the world," he said in an address to the European Parliament on the situation in Iran on Tuesday.

"The EU needs to act swiftly, stop the appeasement policy, tighten sanctions and isolate a regime that executes its own people,” Tynkkynen added.

“Proscribe IRGC as a terrorist organization, stop the trade with Iran, listen to the Iranian people and invite Mr. Reza Pahlavi to address the parliament – the man whose name the people chant in the streets of Iran. Coordinate attacks with the US to weaken the regime to collapse,” he added.

US President Donald Trump on Tuesday did not rule out the use of military option against the Islamic Republic, saying he is "going to see what happens with Iran".

"They were going to hang 837 people, and we let them know that if that happens, that will be a very bad day for them. I can't tell you what's going to happen in the future, but supposedly they've taken that off the table."

"But they were going to last week. They were going to hang on Thursday, Wednesday. They were going to hang, hang, I think 837, people, and they didn't hang anybody. So we're just going to see what happens with Iran," he told reporters on Tuesday.

Panahi said on Instagram that the killing of filmmaker Javad Ganji has been followed by an escalating campaign of intimidation against artists aimed at erasing the truth about protest deaths.

Panahi said directors Majid Barzegar and Behtash Sanaeiha were separately summoned and harshly interrogated for hours over a joint statement condemning state violence, warning that more cinema professionals are expected to face summons and that heavy judicial cases are already open.

"Fars News (IRGC-linked) says that some assets have been seized and convicts will be forced to pay for public damages. The regime is attempting to erase its massacre of protesters by intimidating artists, fabricating loyalty narratives, and burying the truth under judicial repression," Panahi said.

"International filmmakers and artists: Stand with your Iranian colleagues now."

Panahi said state media reported that, on orders from Tehran’s prosecutor, files have been built against 10 House of Cinema signatories, 15 prominent actors and athletes, and around 60 cafés allegedly linked to protests.