Masih Alinejad

As a journalist in Iran covering politics, Alinejad was targeted by government officials. The newspaper she worked for was shut down. In exile in the US, she used social media to rally millions of followers in Iran and abroad around women’s rights issues, building MyStealthyFreedom, an online campaign to end compulsory hijab laws and expose other human rights abuses. In Iran, punishments for women who remove the hijab in public can include lashings and jail. Since its launch in 2014, My Stealthy Freedom claims, it has become the largest civil disobedience campaign for women’s rights in the history of the Islamic Republic. It started on Facebook when Alinjead posted a picture of herself without a hijab, and quickly gained traction. Since then, the movement has used facebook and Instagram to launch other campaigns such as My Forbidden Voice, Men in Hijab, and My Camera is my Weapon. In 2017, it launched White Wednesdays, in which women wear white to protest compulsory hijab laws. Using social media, the movement shares content that would be banned in Iran. For her activism, Alinejad has been targeted by Iranian security forces, who have orchestrated plots to have her kidnaped and returned to Iran, and to have her assassinated on US soil, requiring her and her family to move from one safehouse to the next. Assassins with ties to the Russian mob were convicted in a US court of acting on behalf of Iranian officials to target her at her home in Brooklyn.