DIGITAL GRAVEYARD
Saam Rezaee 20 years old Murdered by the regime January 8, 2026 - Shiraz, Iran.
His last tweet: "Javid Shah"
Sama Esmaeili 20 years old Murdered by gunfire by the regime January 9, 2026 - Iran.
Her Instagram bio: “I love the world.”
Matin Khosravi 24 years old Murdered by gunfire by the regime January 8, 2026 - Gilan, Iran.
His last voice note to his brother: “soon, under the Pahlavi imperial government, we’ll buy a new phone…”
Negin Ghadimi 28 years old Murdered by gunfire by the regime January 9, 2026 - Mazandaran, Iran.
She died in her father's arms.
Arshia Barari 21 years old Murdered by gunfire by the regime January 8, 2026 - Iran.
He was a bodybuilder and an English literature student at the Islamic Azad University of Zanjan.
Samaneh Mirzaei 30 years old Murdered by the regime January 9, 2026 - Tehran, Iran.
Samin Rostami 42 years old Murdered by gunfire by the regime January 2026 - Aram Hospital, Karaj, Iran.
A nurse and mother, who was murdered at the hospital for trying to help a wounded protester.
Mohsen Arbabi 20 years old Murdered by the regime January 9, 2026 - Karaj, Iran.
"He was an animal lover."
Ghazal Demcherli 17 years old Murdered by gunfire by the regime Date Unknown, Karaj, Iran.
She was shot in the face, in front of her mother. She was a graphic design student.
Masoud Bolourchi 37 years old Murdered by gunfire by the regime January 8, 2026 - Iran.
He was shot in the back of the head by a sniper. He was a physiotherapist and the founder of Rash Clinic.
Saghar Etemadi 22 years old Murdered by gunfire by the regime January 4, 2026 - Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari, Iran.
She was shot in the face and survived for 2 days. She was a hairdresser and nail technician. The Iranian government denies her death.
Shayan Asadollahi 28 years old Murdered by gunfire by the regime December 31, 2025 - Lorestan, Iran.
He was a barber.
Amirhesam Khodayarifard 22 years old Murdered by gunfire by the regime December 31, 2026 - Lorestan, Iran.
The regime forced them to declare him a member of the regime in exchange for his corpse. At his funeral, the police tried to steal his corpse again but were chased off. His funeral became a battleground.
Setayesh Saeidi 20 years old Murdered by the regime January 8, 2026 - Tehran, Iran.
She was an orphan with no one to pay the $4,500 USD fine to receive her body. She is buried in an unmarked mass grave.
Sahar Fallah 25 years old Murdered by gunfire by the regime date unknown - Tehran, Iran.
She was an English teacher.
Faezeh Hossein-Nejad 23 years old Murdered by the regime January 9, 2026 - Mashhad, Iran. She was a volleyball player and a midwifery student. She was beaten with batons after being shot.
Diana Bahador 19 years old Murdered by gunfire by the regime January 8, 2026 - Gorgan, Iran. She was a social media influencer with 100k followers, known as "Baby Rider." She loved riding motorcycles. Her family was forced to publicly claim her death was due to a riding accident. A comment on her post says: "Maybe if you weren't born an Iranian woman, you'd still be alive, so you could have been a beautiful model and lived a normal life. Forgive (us)." She was shot twice.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Social media has become an integral platform for resistance for Iranians because it is the only resource they have to share the realities of life under the Islamic Republic. In January 2026, the regime cut Iran’s internet to massacre over 50,000 Iranians. Although Iranians claim the numbers are higher, it is hard to statistically confirm these numbers because we will never know the number/identities of the people who were murdered, abducted, threatened into silence, disfigured, executed, and/or imprisoned by the regime. Social media serves as a digital graveyard, containing the last moments of protesters’ lives. Here, I focused on selfies because the hand motion/gesture of taking a selfie creates a sense of intimacy, highlighting “the physical potential and constraints of the human body” (Frosh 1612) and the “position of companionship” between the viewer and subject (Frosh 1617). The gesture of the selfie humanizes the subject by drawing attention to the body while also creating a sense of intimate connection between the subject and the viewer.
