Farzan Seyedi reflects on the younger generation in Iran, social media, historical memory, and why he believes decades of official anti-American and anti-Israel propaganda have failed to define Iranian youth.
Near the end of the IAC panel, an audience member asked one of the most important questions of the morning: after nearly half a century under the Islamic Republic, do younger Iranians still know the country that existed before the revolution? Her concern was understandable. A government that controls schools, television, textbooks, public ceremonies, and much of the legal system has enormous power to shape historical memory.
My answer was that the Islamic Republic has not succeeded the way it expected. I described the younger generation as 'Generation V'—V for victory—because I see a generation that has become increasingly unwilling to inherit the regime's ideological worldview. For decades, state propaganda repeated messages such as 'Death to America' and 'Death to Israel.' But the internet gave young Iranians access to the very people, places, archives, and arguments that the system told them to hate.
TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, satellite television, messaging apps, podcasts, archived news footage, and diaspora networks have all made ideological isolation harder. Even when platforms are filtered, Iranians have repeatedly used circumvention tools and informal networks to obtain outside information. They have also created their own content, allowing outsiders to hear Persian voices without having every conversation mediated by state broadcasters or foreign correspondents.
This matters for historical memory. Beni Sabti added an important point during the panel: old Iranian television archives and footage from before the revolution have circulated online for years. Young Iranians can watch speeches, city scenes, cultural programs, infrastructure projects, interviews, music, and everyday life from periods their textbooks describe through a heavily ideological lens. They can compare that visual record with what they were taught and make their own judgments.
I also talked about attitudes toward Israel and the United States. I used very strong language during the panel to describe what I see online and in conversations, including an estimate about the overwhelming proportion of young Iranians who express positive views. That estimate was my personal observation, not a scientific national poll, and it should be presented that way. The larger point remains: the state's effort to make anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism permanent features of Iranian identity has clearly encountered resistance, especially among younger Iranians who have direct access to global culture.
This generation is also more politically literate than outsiders sometimes assume. Many young Iranians have learned to compare competing sources because they grew up knowing that official information could not automatically be trusted. They discuss constitutional models, sanctions, monarchy, republicanism, labor rights, women's rights, minority rights, secularism, nationalism, foreign policy, and the mistakes of 1979. They do not all agree, but disagreement itself is evidence of a political culture that exists beyond the boundaries the regime tries to impose.
For me, the most hopeful part is not that young Iranians think exactly as I do. They do not, and they should not have to. The hopeful part is that so many of them insist on thinking for themselves. A free Iran will need citizens who can argue, criticize, organize, vote, lose elections, win elections, and still accept one another as members of the same nation. That political maturity is already being built under extremely difficult conditions.