Which is why some people believe it is orchestrated by a foreign agency

You have the same codes as the AlQaeda propaganda (white text on black background, flames, ridiculous cross targeting an individual and some musical tribal message), which mean the intent was to make sure people instantly understand without context

It's similar with the low quality "drone" footage from the Uyghurs "camps" which i always believed was some Deep Fake video from MI6, i wouldn't be surprised if the CIA was behind this hack, it's way to clean and "clichè", same goal, create division and split territories

I'm probably wrong though, just like with Russia, they didn't act properly and should be punished for it, there are smarter ways to defend your sovereignty and order than to kill your own people or invade other countries, so they deserve their fall

> It's similar with the low quality "drone" footage from the Uyghurs "camps

Multiple news organizations have published high quality satellite photos of the Chinese concentration camps for ethnic minorities and Muslims, published the tenders for their construction and interviewed both victims and former jailers who have fled the country. Chinese officials on record boast about the 100s of thousands they have imprisoned or send to prison like factories across the country and the children they have separated from their parents for "re-education". Would you have us all believe this is an elaborate "MI6" conspiracy?

Source? Actually, low effort agit prop that could actually be done by NGOs. Moral grand standing by US is so tiresome… it’s an Psyop color revolution otherwise we’d see Saudi protests etc.

China has openly acknowledged these camps, going so far has to request the UN acknowledge their sovereignty:

“The Chinese government officially legalized re-education camps in Xinjiang in October 2018.[422] Prior to that, when international media had asked about the re-education camps, China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that they have not heard of this situation.[423]

On 12 August 2018, a Chinese state-run tabloid, Global Times, defended the crackdown in Xinjiang after a U.N. anti-discrimination committee raised concerns over China's treatment of Uyghurs. According to the Global Times, China prevented Xinjiang from becoming 'China's Syria' or 'China's Libya', and local authorities' policies saved countless lives and avoided a 'great tragedy'.[424][425]

On 21 August 2018, Liu Xiaoming, the Ambassador of China to the United Kingdom, wrote an article in response to a Financial Times report entitled "Crackdown in Xinjiang: Where have all the people gone?".[432] Liu's response said: "The education and training measures taken by the local government of Xinjiang have not only effectively prevented the infiltration of religious extremism and helped those lost in extremist ideas to find their way back, but also provided them with employment training in order to build a better life."[433]

In September 2020, amid condemnation from Western countries, Chinese paramount leader Xi Jinping acclaimed the success of his policies in Xinjiang in a 2-day conference expected to set the country's policy for the next years.[445] The Chinese government published a white paper defending its "vocational training centers," claiming that the regional government organised 'employment-oriented training' and labour skills for 1.29 million workers a year from 2014 to 2019.[446]“

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_internment_camps

Quoting lines out of wikipedia, the most corrupted source of information for anything geoploticial is not a contribution.

Lets examine these lies.

422. The source is CNN, an American propaganda outlet. Its sources are a Mike Pence speech, two broken links and 3 other CNN articles.

423. A website called foreignaffairs.com, which is "dedicated to improving the understanding of U.S. foreign policy" according to its about page.

424, 425. Not even claiming anything unusual. Education is a good thing, it's more effective than the American response of bombing weddings.

433. What on earth could be wrong with this? This is wonderful?

445. Yeah, he's right?

446. Again, this is amazing. America could learn from this.

Isn't America, the country we're supposed to believe here, a literal slave state with slavery embedded in the constitution and literal black people enslaved to pick cotton? Yes it is. And the home of 20% of the world's prison population? Yes it is.

But for some reason there's no wiki pages about this...

If you don't like Wikipedia, how about the Chinese government's official arrest statistics? https://web.archive.org/web/20180725042225/https://www.nchrd... Just click on the numbers in the table to verify that they match the original Chinese source.

Of course you can choose to believe that the Internet Archive is in on the conspiracy, in which case you cannot be helped.

Or you can choose to believe that Chinese police were exaggerating their arrest statistics to make themselves look good, in which case I have an interesting article for you that mentions the practice: https://madeinchinajournal.com/2019/10/25/punish-and-cure%ef...

Do you remember when chinese were only able to give 1 single birth?

That policy never applied to ethnic groups, so the idea that the chinese government is trying to imprison ethnic groups to "re-educate" them is hard to believe

Concerning the MI6 story, it's not a conspiracy, when you share that kind of classified, military, materials with the public, your intent is not the truth, it's always manipulation, specially when the videos are always blurry, in the age of HD content, it's kinda fishy, maybe they want to obfuscate the imperfections, it gives me similar Colin Powell vibes

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/colin-powell-u-n-...

None of what you mention presents plausible evidence of your statement implying that CIA/MI6 have monolithic control over information regarding the camps. Not to say they aren't manipulating information or have no involvement, but none of the evidence you present backs up your claim.

Enforcing the birth of children and sending people to camps are two very different issues.

The content not being HD could be explained by them using less detectable drones. I would imagine that flying a military or HD drone over sovereign territory would be dangerous and an act of aggression, so it's within the realm of belief that someone, perhaps covertly, used a drone less likely to draw suspicion, not easily detectable or traceable to foreign interests.

Moreover if you watch the Frontline (the same source you cited above) documentaries about Iraq, you'll find they present people working in intelligence at the time explicitly told officials Zarqawi was sketchy and that the information he presented was not supported by the intel they had.

I'm not saying it's a certainty without doubt that the camps are everything what some sources allege them to be, but it's also not certain without a doubt that they aren't.

> That policy never applied to ethnic groups, so the idea that the chinese government is trying to imprison ethnic groups to "re-educate" them is hard to believe

I’m trying to understand this paragraph. In your mind, in what way does the one child policy make any of this hard to believe? How does that policy change our understanding of what’s going on in these camps?

If they were against ethnic groups, as the current western propaganda wants us to believe, they would have applied that policy so they'd have less of that "problematic ethnic group"

They didn't, which mean they are fine having ethnic groups

The west is pushing this propaganda because it's a known fact that the US want to split the Chinese territory (Tibetan, Uighurs, Taiwanese) (same with Russia btw)

For the same reason they now, publicly announced, want to hinder China's development

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/asia/china-lashes-out-latest...

> They didn't, which mean they are fine having ethnic groups

This is a gigantic leap to a conclusion that does not logically follow the premises, and ignores evidence that requires no such leaps.

I guess it was the inevitable that the Chinese propaganda machine would make its way to HN.

> This is a gigantic leap to a conclusion that does not logically follow the premises, and ignores evidence that requires no such leaps.

If by evidence you mean blurry twitter videos, then i agree with you, it is a gigantic leap to a conclusion that does not logically follow the premises, and ignores evidence that requires no such leaps

> I guess it was the inevitable that the Chinese propaganda machine would make its way to HN.

I am not pro-china, i am intellectually ascended

If you’re only aware of blurry videos on Twitter, I’d recommend you do a deeper dive and look at additional reporting on this matter. You don’t have to look very far [0] (just a single example).

At least you acknowledge the gigantic leap in your argument.

How does one go through the ascension process?

- [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/extra/85qihtvw6e/the-faces-from-chi...

You can start by taking the stages and realising and admitting to yourself that you've been had. The propaganda you've just posted is all fake. These images are all fake, and obviously so. All the eyes are at an identical pitch, when you go to the source you'll find many of them wearing exactly the same clothes, with exactly the same creases. Here's more debunking this fake "hack"

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1529035481203154945.html

It just has to be good enough to get a headline in the news, it never stands up to scrutiny and people need a lot of courage to admit to themselves that reputed mainstream news outlets are lying to them constantly.

> These images are all fake, and obviously so.

As a photographer, what about these images is obviously fake?

> All the eyes are at an identical pitch

Which is evidence of what? Generally, when booking photos are taken, the subject is asked to look at a single spot to preserve consistency and identifiability.

> when you go to the source you'll find many of them wearing exactly the same clothes, with exactly the same creases.

I find it very unsurprising that people in a prison situation are wearing the same clothes.

All of my clothing is also creased in the same places, but this is no big conspiracy, there are just popular ways of folding clothes…

I’m always interested in getting the whole story, but you’re going to need to share a less sketchy link…

>As a photographer, what about these images is obviously fake?

As a rational person, everything about the photos is obviously fake. Take a look at this website: thispersondoesnotexist.com . You can see a new victim of communism each time you refresh the page. It's easy to create such images, but here they didn't make much effort to differentiate them and there's some slamdunk obvious fakes.

>Which is evidence of what? Generally, when booking photos are taken, the subject is asked to look at a single spot to preserve consistency and identifiability.

I'm starting to think you're being dishonest with me and perhaps yourself. This is a silly reason to claim that eyes would be at the same pitch, and besides, the people having exactly the same clothes in the same places? Multiple people?

This one has to be my favourite: https://www.xinjiangpolicefiles.org/wp-content/uploads/dt_im...

This one is where the AI doesn't know human anatomy and the head doesn't connect to the body correctly:

https://www.xinjiangpolicefiles.org/wp-content/uploads/dt_im...

Here's one where it couldn't decide if the glasses existed or not:

https://www.xinjiangpolicefiles.org/wp-content/uploads/dt_im...

I know it's hard to face up to the shattering of the illusion of BBC impartiality (and all of western media in general) and especially the scale of the lies being pushed at you, but you need to be able to do this as a grown adult in 2022. You can't even claim that the BBC have been fooled, they are overtly and openly using Adrian Zenz as a source. Talk about "sketchy". It's interesting that you didn't call the BBC's fundamentalist-christian homophobic racist source, "sketchy".

> As a rational person, everything about the photos is obviously fake. Take a look at this website: thispersondoesnotexist.com

As a rational person, the existence of thispersondoesnotexist.com has as much bearing on the realness of these photos as it does on the realness of any other photo that exists.

I thought you might have at least a stretched-but-plausible argument but this is just not even worthy of consideration.

> I know it's hard to face up to the shattering of the illusion of BBC impartiality (and all of western media in general)…

I have no allusions about the impartiality and bias of media - western or otherwise. The existence of bias does not invalidate the existence of facts. Even a biased news outlet is often correct (with details missing that must be filled in from elsewhere, which is distinctly different from reporting pure falsehoods). But we don’t have to just rely on the BBC here - this is a well covered issue at this point.

> …and especially the scale of the lies being pushed at you

The real question is, are you aware of the scale of the lies pushed by your own government?

At this point I’m not interested in continuing to defend against logical fallacies from an obvious mouthpiece of the Chinese state, so I’m not planning to reply again. But if in the very slight chance that you’re just some Irish guy who hates the west, ask yourself what elevates your own unsubstantiated claims above those of career journalists and human rights organizations. Ask yourself if you’re comfortable siding with a potentially genocidal but definitely authoritarian state.

Wow those last two are some pretty bad fakes. The first one I could blame on like file corruption or something, but I can't think of any way to explain the last two.

The one where the "head doesn't connect to the body correctly" shows a man with a tensed sternocleidomastoid muscle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sternocleidomastoid_muscle

The one where "it couldn't decide if the glasses existed or not" probably shows a woman wearing cochlear implants behind her ears.

Sorry but humans do not look like that, sternocleidomastoid or no. Even the shadow makes no sense. Cochlear implants are, implanted, not worn over the ears.

There's many many more pictures like this. They're fake people.

Such an intellectually lazy accusation that people are part of some "propaganda machine" because they simply call out obvious nonsense propaganda and lies from our own country's media.

Coverage of the abuses in these prisons is not limited to a single country or region of the world. And which is “my own” country’s media?

It is not intellectual laziness to observe that an account primarily parrots the propaganda of foreign repressive governments.

Your own account is rather interesting in that regard.

Coverage of these abuses is limited to the west. The USA and its vassal states. I have no idea which your country's media is except they we're both in the west.

I agree with your parroting of the propaganda of repressive regimes, your admission is noted. The USA is the most repressive regime on the planet by any metric.

I see your only response now that your dishonesty has been called out is to try to cast aspersions on the caller, rather than deal with the points of discussion.

As an “Irish” person you sure are remarkably interested in defending the Chinese state.

Considering Irish history, your stories seem… incongruous.

Strange, I would have said the opposite. Irish people tend to be opposed to imperialism considering our history of suffering under it.

But I don't defend the Chinese state at all, I just call out western warmongering lies.

> If they were against ethnic groups, as the current western propaganda wants us to believe, they would have applied that policy so they'd have less of that "problematic ethnic group"

> They didn't, which mean they are fine having ethnic groups

Or, they just didn't deem the issue relevant enough to spend the resources to deal with it. China is a large country, some of those ethnic groups exist in remote locations, some very difficult to reach- it has been the case numerous times when a natural disaster occurred and aid was slow to reach those regions because of logistical difficulties.

Perhaps it wasn't that they are fine with the ethnic groups, but that they were indifferent and/or deemed them unimportant unless they had sufficient reason to think they warranted the attention/involvement.

Mind that just because they didn't want to lower their numbers, doesn't mean they have no issue with those groups, or that they wouldn't have issues with them if the situation and their perception of them changed.

Taiwan is not part of China. There’s nothing for the US to split.

I have never met a single person that isn’t a Chinese propogandaist that actually believes Taiwan is a part of China. It’s such an obvious calling card.

Literally every country in the world, including the USA, believes that Taiwan is a part of China. You're extremely uninformed on this matter.

The US does not consider Taiwan part of China. The US follows one China policy which is that they acknowdge Chinas position that it believes Taiwan is part of China.

That’s like saying “I understand you believe that the sky is pink.”

Hence she the US refers to it as strategic ambiguity. This is the same position that the likes of NZ and AU have.

So don’t go telling people they are uninformed when clearly you’re just here spreading propaganda.

You're just splitting hairs. It's the same picture.

There’s a reason why the CCP uses the One China Principle while countries like the US have One China Policy.

Don’t forget that the CCP advocated for Taiwan independence, and during an interview Mao said they would help Taiwan (Formosa) in its struggle for independence. During a conference in Moscow in the 1920s they referred to Taiwan as an independent nation and nationality. This only changed in 1943.

There’s no long China history with China. When the Dutch went to Taiwan there was no presence of Ming dynasty. And at no point in history had china ever controlled or ruled over Taiwan. The CCP has never even set food in Taiwan.

So it literally has no valid claims to Taiwan. Regardless of any opinions you may hold.

If that’s splitting hairs then there’s no point in discussing because you obviously don’t care about history or facts and only regurgitate propaganda.

Are you aware of the forced marriages to ethnic Han Chinese people? I am having trouble following your logic.

Source?

He's referring to:

“Darren Byler, an anthropologist at Simon Fraser University who studies repression in Xinjiang, recently uncovered evidence that some Han “relatives” in Uyghur homes had coerced women into such marriages.”

Byler, who is also an American Kissinger Institute fellow. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/person/darren-byler

If it's China news, and it's in the west, it's really good policy to completely disbelieve the claims first and then demand evidence. You won't get any.

This has been one of the more absurd mainstream conspiracy theories pushed in living memory. The ridiculous claims of millions in prison and people being taken off the street to be tortured in vans for reasons nobody can even be bothered to invent a reason for. This is classic atrocity propaganda. The region has been visited by numbers of organisations who all find everything to be fine, yet the EU refuses to visit, when the UN visited and found everything above board, the High Commissioner was forced to resign.

>Multiple news organizations have published high quality satellite photos of the Chinese concentration camps for ethnic minorities and Muslims

All that has been published has been repeatedly debunked. Photographs are faked or of completely different parts of China. Fake witness testimony is laughed at even on extreme sinophobic websites like reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/e9ad4n/i_am_rushan_ab...

She claims to be an Uyghur activist and that many of her friends were locked up in the concentration camps. So what is the big news? She failed to mention her association with NED, a literal branch of CIA, and her participation in the human rights abuse in Guantanamo Bay in 2003, an _actual_ verifiable human rights atrocity.

Then you have mainstream news agencies using this kind of thing as a source.

https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/the-big-business-of-uyghur...

This is a fake news article from a fake magazine funded by a fake university. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairfax_University_of_America#... . It's 20km down the road from CIA University.

>interviewed both victims and former jailers who have fled the country.

For an apparent genocide of millions of people, something claimed by a man, Adrian Zenz, who's been sent by God on a mission to rid the world of homosexuals and communists, nobody has ever been able to find a single credible refugee. Zenz is funded by the CIA.

The BBC even publishes obvious deepfakes of "victims" sourced from Zenz. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/85qihtvw6e/the-faces-from-c...

All of these pictures are fake people, created with such tech as https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ .

>Chinese officials on record boast about the 100s of thousands they have imprisoned or send to prison like factories across the country and the children they have separated from their parents for "re-education".

This is not true. Nothing you've claimed in your comment is. All "leaked documents" have been shown to be fakes. Badly translated, with literal cursors captured in the screenshot in some cases.

January 2019: China invited UN observers.

https://www.dawn.com/news/1456065

June 2019: China invited UN High commissioner.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/China-Invites-UN-to-Visi...

Many News Outlets like BBC and Vice have also done documentaries on the issue, with BBC having the opportunity to actually go inside the vocational training schools. The result? No matter how hard BBC tried to portray the schools as hell on earth, including blatantly mistranslating interviewee’s words, using out of context satellite images, and making up lies about a “graffiti that they just so happened to have found on a wall,” the documentary shows nothing of the accused “human right violations,” which of course upsets the conspiracy advocates.

If anyone needs some entertaining debunking of this nonsense, watch the BBC's documentary about it, where they find absolutely nothing but use scary music and shaky cam to push the lies.

https://medium.com/@sunfeiyang/breaking-down-the-bbcs-visit-...

I live in China, I think if our asses were so clean, we could all go there and even visit these reform camps they said they built and are not at all cruel and inhumane.

You can say the foreigners exagerate, sure they do, but hum, it's not like there's no fire behind all this smoke...

However I've always been careful not to call it a genocide: for me we must prove the mass deaths first.

Genocide doesn't mean mass killing.

Just to cite Wikipedia...

> In 1948, the United Nations Genocide Convention defined genocide as any of five "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such." These five acts were: killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group. Victims are targeted because of their real or perceived membership of a group, not randomly.

Well, but that isn’t the definition tend to think of right? They do think mass killing, it’s part of why the word has such power. If it was merely portrayed as the Chinese working to forcibly convert Muslims a lot of the US would shrug and say that seems good

I can tell you believe this, and I do think it seems possible to me the west over plays it’s hand. Especially the genocide label, but your evidence isn’t exactly strong. You make it sound like Adrian Zenz is a cultist when as far as I can tell he’s just a passionate critic. As to the photos being deepfaked, I only look at a handful. One did look a bit suspicious, none of the others did, and none of them have that vanilla this person isn’t real type look. I also see the fact that China restricts travel to the region as compelling evidence of foul play even if when they occasionally do take people on tours they don’t find anything. Like you do know the Nazis produced lovely videos of concentration camps full have happy people just living out the war or whatever, China is hiding something.

My fairly uninformed guess (and tell me if this seems right to you) is that what’s going on is merely on the level of what the US did to American Indians what with the boarding schools and the forced removal of their children with maybe a touch of forced labor on the side for spice.

But it’s always worth remembering on this subject, only one of these countries tries to have the state capacity to squash dissent so yes I am a bit more skeptical of what their mouth pieces have to tell the world

This is insane. The human rights violations against Uighurs in Xinjiang are well documented by serious institutions like the UN human rights office.

Read their recent report here: https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/countrie...

I posted a long response to this which seems to have been censored, probably because of hyperlinks to forbidden sites? I'll post it again without the links:

This has been one of the more absurd mainstream conspiracy theories pushed in living memory. The ridiculous claims of millions in prison and people being taken off the street to be tortured in vans for reasons nobody can even be bothered to invent a reason for. This is classic atrocity propaganda. The region has been visited by numbers of organisations who all find everything to be fine, yet the EU refuses to visit, when the UN visited and found everything above board, the High Commissioner was forced to resign.

>Multiple news organizations have published high quality satellite photos of the Chinese concentration camps for ethnic minorities and Muslims

All that has been published has been repeatedly debunked. Photographs are faked or of completely different parts of China. Fake witness testimony is laughed at even on extreme sinophobic websites like reddit, like when Rushan Abbas did an AMA on there. She claims to be an Uyghur activist and that many of her friends were locked up in the concentration camps. So what is the big news? She failed to mention her association with NED, a literal branch of CIA, and her participation in the human rights abuse in Guantanamo Bay in 2003, an _actual_ verifiable human rights atrocity.

>interviewed both victims and former jailers who have fled the country.

These are fakes. For an apparent genocide of millions of people, something claimed by a man, Adrian Zenz, who's been sent by God on a mission to rid the world of homosexuals and communists, nobody has ever been able to find a single credible refugee. Zenz is funded by the CIA.

The BBC even publishes obvious deepfakes of "victims" sourced from Zenz. See "The faces from China’s Uyghur detention camps". All of these pictures are fake images, created with such tech as thispersondoesnotexist dot com .

>Chinese officials on record boast about the 100s of thousands they have imprisoned or send to prison like factories across the country and the children they have separated from their parents for "re-education".

This is not true. Nothing you've claimed in your comment is. All "leaked documents" have been shown to be fakes. Badly translated, with literal cursors captured in the screenshot in some cases.

Many News Outlets like BBC and Vice have also done documentaries on the issue, with BBC having the opportunity to actually go inside the vocational training schools. The result? No matter how hard BBC tried to portray the schools as hell on earth, including blatantly mistranslating interviewee’s words, using out of context satellite images, and making up lies about a “graffiti that they just so happened to have found on a wall,” the documentary shows nothing of the accused “human right violations,” which of course upsets the conspiracy advocates.

If anyone needs some entertaining debunking of this nonsense, watch the BBC's documentary about it, where they find absolutely nothing but use scary music and shaky cam to push the lies. Google: "breaking down the bbcs visit to hotan xinjiang"

I stopped when you said "sinophobes". It is classic CCP counter-intel to describe all of it's enemies as racist.

Why are you here on a thread about Iran anyways?

I wish people would stop bragging about not reading.

Anti Asian hate crimes have skyrocketed since this propaganda campaign kicked off. Sinophobia is a very real thing, not a "psyop". The propaganda relies on the masses' well cultivated racism in order to propagate. Nobody would believe any of this if it was about a 'respected' country and not some unknowable other on the other side of the planet, that we're meant to believe the US has grave humanitarian concerns about.

>Why are you here on a thread about Iran anyways?

Where should I be? It's Sunday morning, it's raining in Dublin.

2 hours ago, when you made your comment, it wasn’t morning in Dublin. It was mid-afternoon.

I was just out of bed. Morning for me.

>the intent was to make sure people instantly understand without context

This goes without saying, but this isn't exclusive to AlQaeda. Using video editing to convey a strong message isn't enough reason to conclude there is a link to foreign intelligence. Most likely they were just trying to be direct and convey a message (a statement to the regime that the people are tired of and angry about the oppression/violence)- none of what you mentioned to explain your association to AlQaeda makes any sense- "musical tribal message"? Are you inplying AlQaeda is controlled by a foreign agency? Which agency?

Really makes it sound like you have a very vague understanding of the region, alongside a very strong bias.

This has the marks of a colour revolution.

From the false news spread constantly being spread by Masiha Alinejad, to the focus on a small but growing group of protestors, to the massive social media campaigns trying to flame the situation both in and outside of Iran, this is well coordinated.

Mahsa Amini collapsed at a facility and was never hurt. No signs of being beaten are visible on her hospital pictures or her entry into the re-education centers. And yet the protest started from a few handful and started growing over several days.

This is a coordinated campaign of disinformation and protest.

Would you want Iranian system in Pakistan?

I would not want the Iranian system anywhere but Iran

The questions surrounding the involvement of foreign actors are interesting meanly because of the timing. It’s interesting that Iran see a vague of mass protests right after the utter failure of the nuclear talks and when they are admittedly very close to getting the bomb. Plenty of foreign powers therefore have an interest into seeing the current regime fall down and have historically never been above giving a gentle push in the right direction. It wouldn’t in any way make the reasons of the protests illegitimate however.

Now, I don’t really understand why you bring Al Qaeda and the Uyghurs to the mix. That needlessly muddies your point.

It's all linked, ignoring it is lying to yourself, worse, it is disingenuous

That is like ...nothing, then you have like no idea how omnipresent this type of pop culture is (for good or for worse). Of course iranians watch these types of movies and of course an iranian hacker would be aware of the mask symbolism

These masks are also made by the Chinese in the billions and available in any "Bazar" for very cheap so they're a cheap way to obscure your identity :)

Not saying this is the case here (for TV this is probably well considered and it's not the standard Chinese mask which is the 'smiling' version) but there might be more than one explanation especially for seeing them on the street during protests.

The genesis may have been “V for Vendetta” but I believe Anonymous used a similar mask and it’s possible the hacker/s are aware of that.

Anonymous, and many other unrelated protesters, used the V for Vendetta mask when protesting against Scientology not just as a symbol but rather because of the cult..er church well known tactics of harassing anyone who opposes them. They usually followed protesters until they put the mask off so they or their car license plate could be photographed easing the identification.

Maybe that was the intention but it doesn't really look like a Guy Fawkes mask at all though, other than being a white face mask. Eyebrows and eye cut-outs are different, it has a full beard, it's not a v-shaped face, etc.

The red and green is just the Iranian flag though. What culture were you thinking of? Suiseiseki?