Comment by bijant

At this point I don't believe anything about the situation unless I hear it firsthand from eyewitnesses. The amount of GenAI fakes circulating not just on insta and x but more importantly between iranian-born Boomers on Whatsapp that then gets recycled into: "My aunt in LA knows people in a Tehran Hospital and has seen videos of mass casualties amongst security forces/ protesters" is off the charts. Obviously until the internet gets turned on again the aunt has no privileged access to her sources in Tehran and can't have seen anything other then the same AI-slop everyone else has "seen" but for people who haven't been following the genAI developments closely its hard to understand how any of those videos could be anything other than authentic anyways. Even reputable Media have started to publish (and sometimes retract) those video and even if you don't care about Iran at all you should pay attention because this is a case study of something we'll be living with for a while. For the many Millions of people outside of Iran, like me, who for one reason or another have a personal interest in this clusterfruck of a Regime finally being EOLed, it's incredibly frustrating to witness the degree of incompetency at all levels of the US Gov in carrying out something the US used to lead the world in (regime change). While under Obama there was the consideration of plausible deniability at play constraining the work that could be carried out, the current admin has no such excuse. There seems to have been little to no contingency planning to aid the people we armed in case the Regime shut-off the internet (which they have done before) other than handing out easily tracked starlink terminal. Half of Tehran has a recent iPhone and satellite coms on these devices could easily have been enabled by the US Gov. Instead we have US officials on fox news producing clip after clip where they proudly detail the regime change operations they fail to carry out, which iranian state TV just have to translate for free pro-Regime Propaganda. Maybe the strategy is to scare all iranian propagandists that they'll be unemployed because their jobs have been outsourced to the US because otherwise you certainly would not have these same US officials on FOX to then explain why shooting peaceful protesters is great and totally a-OK and what democracy looks like.