Comment by Bender
2 days ago
I guess this will be a difficult question to ask. I have no doubt the numbers are high but there is something odd about the videos that leak out. The sound of the guns are enhanced for psychological effect? and in the cases where a gunner on a truck is moving down a road purportedly mowing people down there is no blood on the road where the protestors had been standing, no bodies and we never see the people being shot. It's not like I want to see people being shot but I've also seen a lot of fake mass shooting videos in the past decade. There's no shortage of real uncensored footage of killing in Ukraine. Why is everything censored for Iran?
Ukraine was historically more or less a free-for-all as far as front-line cinema is concerned.
I have to imagine the situation in Iran is more difficult for a few reasons:
1. Gen AI is much better today than it was in 2022. So, both sides can generate much more realistic fakes.
2. There was an article here on HN about Iran's internet slowly coming back on a whitelist basis. We're probably getting more pro-Government videos now than we were at the beginning of the current events.
3. Further crackdown on Starlink minimizes authentic leaks (I only heard about this and have no way to confirm how impactful this really is)
I'll add my own anecdotal agreement with your suspicion though - the footage coming out of Iran has been, for me, more difficult than other conflicts to piece together into a cohesive story. Western countries are claiming 30k+ dead, and while I don't necessarily reject the claim, the situation on the ground is still very blurry to me.
Regarding the whitelist: is anyone working on getting the list?
I am sure some people would like to know who’s on the whitelist.
Because the internet is out so it’s extremely difficult to get the footage out.
There is footage slowly trickling out.
I don't like promoting gore websites but in watchpeopledie and search Iran you can count yourself at least hundreds of body from all the videos, often in a single location, usually the aftermath.
Along that line 4chan is full of pictures and videos of all the MN shooting incidents and even memes already but not a single Iranian video.
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