IranWire:

Hossein Derakhshan, an Iranian-Canadian blogger known for supporting the Iranian government’s suppression of dissidents and alleged collaboration with Tehran’s security apparatus, has been awarded a prestigious fellowship, shocking many Iranians inside the country and in the diaspora and human rights advocates around the globe.

The fellowship, with MIT Media Lab and the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy based at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, was announced on January 11. Derakhshan had previously co-authored a report on misinformation on social networks, which was published by the Shorenstein Center in 2017.

Kave Shahrooz, a Toronto-based lawyer and Harvard Law School graduate, is among those who took to Twitter to campaign against Shorenstein’s decision, expressing hope that it would “rethink this mistaken decision.”

Shorenstein’s director, Nicco Mele, defended Derakhshan’s appointment. “The work that Hossein is doing at the Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center is not about Iran or politics related to Iran,” Mele said in a statement emailed to IranWire. “The school does not endorse a particular position regarding the Iranian opposition.”

“We are supporting Hossein’s genuinely important research on the role of digital platforms in information ecosystems,” he added, citing as examples of Derakhshan’s previous work a blogpost he wrote on “the future of the web,” as well as the co-authored Shorestein report.

Derakhshan has not responded to IranWire’s requests for comment.

Derakhshan, the father of blogging in Iran, comes from a family with impeccable revolutionary credentials. His uncle Ali Derakhshan  was a founding member of an influential pre-revolutionary pro-Khomeini political party, some of whose members engaged in assassinations, and he was killed himself in a bombing by the People's Mojahedin of Iran, also known as the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), in 1981. 

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