Iranian models arrested for ‘un-Islamic’ social media photos
Their elegant, attractive, and flashy pictures on their social media sites led to the arrest and interrogation of several famous Iranian models by the Iranian Islamic police.
Basij, Iran’s morality police, hauled the models whose snaps were deemed by the authorities to be too revealing and ‘Western’.
This arrest was in sync with a state-perpetrated operation named Spider-2, which identified 58 models, 59 photographers, and 51 salon owners ‘guilty’ of having ‘indecent social media activity’.
Among those models handcuffed before judges include popular users of social media site Instagram: Niloofar Behboudi, Dana Nik, Shabnam Molavi, Hamid Fadaei, Melikaa Zamani, Donya Moghadam and Elnaz Golrokh, a professional make-up artist and high-fashion model. Most of the models worked and resided in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
Another female model, Elham Arab, deactivated her Instagram account on Monday while other models compactly kept their accounts as an act of defiance. She was arraigned and sued for ‘promoting Western promiscuity’; Arab will be coerced to apologize in public.
These high-profile Iranian models pose for reputable fashion lines and share in in their social media accounts. Spider-2 also monitored close to 300 Instagram accounts of Iranians.
According to the Daily Mail, nearly 46 million of the 79 million population in the country have access to the internet. Iranians have restricted access to social media sites Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube – thus making Instagram handily available for all.
In 2014, six Iranian youths were arrested over their rendition of Will Pharell’s dance hit “Happy”, which was uploaded on YouTube. Gianna Francesca Catolico
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