Today in crazy celebrity conspiracy theories — Kim Kardashian is corrupting young Iranians. I agree that her selfie book was less than progressive in terms of cultural development, but this story is kind of out there.
According to an article published on IranWire, a website run by Iranian citizen journalists in the diaspora, Iran's Revolutionary Guard thinks that Kardashian is a secret agent using social media pages to corrupt young people.
Considering that Kardashian is a business woman, entrepreneur, and reality television star, this statement is pretty accurate. She does try to influence her followers and sell products. But in Iran, this is not accepted. The rest of the claims in the article are quite dramatic, especially since they're reportedly from The Revolutionary Guard, which is a wing of Iran's armed forces that focuses on internal and external threats, like managing Iran's ballistic missile arsenal.
In their eyes, Kardashian is playing a major part in corrupting the country's youth.
The original claims are in an article titled "Kim Kardashian, The Infiltrator," which sounds more like a comedic spoof of Keeping Up With the Kardashians than a real agency report.
IranWire writes that the Revolutionary Guard believes that Kardashian's presence in media, specifically on Instagram, purposely aims to corrupt the Iranian youth. They say she has a "hidden hand" in promoting "fashion modeling to Iran" and that she is working with the CEO of Instagram, Kevin Systrom.
“Ms. Kim Kardashian is a popular fashion model so Instagram’s CEO tells her, ‘make this native,’" said Mostafa Alizadeh, spokesman for the Organized Cyberspace Crimes Unit during a news program on May 15, IranWire reports. “There is no doubt that financial support is involved as well. We are taking this very seriously."
But beyond these accusations against the selfie-obsessed Kardashian is the fact that there are actual women being prosecuted in Iran because of their interest in beauty, fashion, and modeling on their social media pages, as another article on IranWire points out.
The article introduces the "new criminals" of Iran — fashion models. The women have had their Instagram pages shut down, been arrested, and even fled the country, all because of their careers as makeup artists or beauticians. The BBC reports that eight unnamed women have recently been arrested due to "un-Islamic Instagram modeling." Another 170 are under investigation.
Refinery29 is committed to telling the stories of young Iranian women through its series, Tehran Unveiled.
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