Iranian schoolgirls protest
- A viral video shows Iranian schoolgirls chanting 'Death to the Islamic regime,' attracting tens of thousands of likes. - The clip reportedly gathered over 23,000 likes and widespread reposting on social platforms. - The footage signals ongoing domestic unrest and a new wave of visible youth dissent inside Iran. (x.com)
A viral clip of Iranian schoolgirls chanting against the Islamic Republic is real protest footage, but it is not new: fact-checkers traced it to October 2022. (newschecker.in) Newschecker and The Quint both identified the video as part of the schoolgirl protests that followed Mahsa Amini’s death in custody in September 2022. Their reviews linked the footage to posts and reports published on October 4, 2022. (newschecker.in) (thequint.com) Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman, died on September 16, 2022, three days after morality police detained her in Tehran over alleged hijab violations, according to BBC reporting cited by Newschecker. Her death set off nationwide demonstrations that spread from streets into schools and universities. (newschecker.in) By early October 2022, videos from Karaj, Saqez and other cities showed teenage girls removing headscarves, chanting “Death to the dictator,” and confronting school officials, according to Human Rights Watch and other contemporaneous reports. (hrw.org) (observers.france24.com) The clip is circulating again against a different backdrop. Iran has faced a fresh wave of protests since December 28, 2025, when demonstrations over soaring prices and a collapsing rial widened into open opposition to clerical rule. (aljazeera.com) (amnesty.org) Al Jazeera reported on January 12, 2026 that the rial had fallen to more than 1.4 million to the dollar, food prices were averaging 72 percent above a year earlier, and protest slogans had shifted from economic grievances to direct attacks on the political system. (aljazeera.com) Amnesty International said protests that began in late December 2025 were met with a deadly crackdown and, from January 8, 2026, a near-total internet shutdown that made new footage harder to verify and easier to mislabel. (amnesty.org) That is why the recycled schoolgirl video keeps resurfacing: it captures a real moment of youth dissent inside Iran, but the footage itself belongs to the 2022 uprising, not the current protest wave. (thequint.com) (newschecker.in)
