NOURNEWS - It was Tuesday afternoon when Raffaele Mauriello, an Italian professor living in Tehran, tweeted a series of nice photos of a café in the Iranian capital titled "Living in Tehran". The photos were soon met with a chorus of condemnations and abusive remarks by an army of Twitter trolls who accused Mauriello of being a "propagandist" and of having "close ties with the government".
Mauriello, an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages at Allameh Tabataba'i University, tweeted the photos - pictured below - after drinking tea with his wife and daughter at a café located in central Tehran, without having the faintest idea of how such "dangerous" sequence of actions would lead to "a war" on Twitter.
While he did not claim that everything in Tehran or Iran was beautiful and that there was no poverty, unemployment or corruption - all irrelevant and unrelated to his tweet - Mauriello was attacked, insulted and even threatened afterward by trolls who claimed that only apologists, the minions of the Iranian government and the superrich would post nice things about Iran in general and Tehran in particular.
They claimed he was "rich" and was "living in a bubble" in uptown Tehran - both of which he denied, pointing out that he was being paid like any other of his Iranian colleagues working at a public university. There were xenophobic rants by some who pointed to Iran's high unemployment rate to say that Mauriello should not be employed as a professor in Iran. There were also lots of replies which are no longer available, being deleted either by Twitter or the users who posted them.
On the other hand, a lot of people also rejected the smear campaign, the xenophobic sentiments, and the Iran-hating trolls. They told Mauriello that Iran's doors remain open to people from other countries and that he should not take the attacks seriously. They also joked that he would have been cheered on Twitter if he had posted hideous photos of Iran, coupled with a few sharp blows to the Iranian government.
"This is a pressure that is being put on all Iranians through the media and every possible tool, to make sure they feel miserable and frustrated every moment, to make sure no image of Iran other than what they want is broadcast, even if it's as simple as a photo of a café," a user wrote. "This psychological pressure is complementary to the sanctions war that is [focused on] shattering Iranians."
" How weird is that? An Italian who lives in Tehran and enjoys going to cafeterias ☕️ (with his wife and their toddler)! He is a threat to democracy, the international order and world security