Abbas Amanat

And they see on social media what happens in the rest of the world.

They're well aware.

They're much better digitally skilled.

than my generation, for instance.

And they know about all the personalities.

They know about all the celebrities.

They know about all the trends that goes on outside Iran.

So that's a second part of this message.

And then, of course, the third part is the word azadi, meaning freedom or liberty, which is this long-standing demand of the...

Iranians, I would say for the whole century, ever since the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, Iran has witnessed this problem of authorities that usually emerged at the end of a revolution to basically impose its own image on the population, on the youth.

and create authoritarian regimes of which, over the course of time, I would say that the Islamic Republic is the worst, in the sense that its intrusion is not only in the political sense, for instance, banning the freedom of speech,

meddling with the elections, banning political parties, all kinds of that things, which are the political or civil freedoms, but it's intrusion into the personal life of the individual, which is the worst kind, in a sense, as you would see that there is always an authority that basically dominates your life or monitors your life.

And they do it in a kind of a very consistent fashion, which makes this idea of freedom so important as part of the message of this new movement.

You would see that in today's Iran, there are no independent political parties.

There is very little...

probably freedom of the press.

I wouldn't say that it's entirely gone, but it's fairly limited.

There's enormous amount of propaganda machine, which dominates the entire radio and TV system in Iran.

It's completely in the hands of the government.

And of course you would see this variety of other tools,