Were 15,000 Protesters Sentenced to Death?

Currently, with the Taylor Swift Eras tour fiasco, talk about Twitter being gone tomorrow, and Trump announcing his 2024 campaign, the rest of the news has been in the shadows. On November 14th, an Instagram post circulated saying, "Iran sentenced 15,000 protesters to death". The post quickly spread and was even reposted by several celebrities, gaining even greater traction. The problem was that it wasn't true. So, although this news story is one that was being covered a lot, I wanted to talk about the reality that isn't being discussed.

Up until looking for a news story to discuss, I, myself, still thought that the original story was true. There are a couple news outlets trying to clarify the story, but I no longer see any Instagram posts or tweets about the topic. PolitiFact cleared up the narrative explaining that three separate pieces of news were merged together to create this story. The first piece was that one single protester was sentenced to death by the Iranian government for setting a government building on fire. The second was that at least 14,000 protesters have been arrested over six weeks. Third, the majority of Iran's parliament "has called on the judiciary to act decisively against the arrested protesters (Uribe 2022).

This goes to show how easily the news can get twisted these days, especially when popular figures are also fooled by clickbait headlines. Additionally, it was not too difficult for the original headline put out by NewsWeek to be twisted, as it read "Iran Protesters Refuse to Back Down as 15,000 Face Execution". However, upon clarification, the majority of the parliament was calling for harsh punishments, which could include the death penalty.