Just hours before, Donald Trump had taken to Truth Social to express his concern over the purported imminent executions of eight women in Iran. His post included a screenshot featuring a collage of glamorously backlit portraits, which many quickly accused of being artificially generated. A viral post on X mockingly noted, “Trump is begging Iranian leaders to not execute 8 AI-generated women. This is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.”

In a swift response, Iranian state media Mizan labeled Trump’s announcement as deceitful. “Last night, Donald Trump, citing a completely false news story, called on Iran to overturn the death sentences of eight women,” the agency stated, clarifying that some of these women had already been released, while others faced prison terms rather than execution. According to Mizan, Tehran had made no concessions, suggesting the status of the women remained unchanged.

Adding fuel to the fire, the Iranian embassy in South Africa, known for its provocative posts, joined the fray by creating its own set of eight women’s images.

Mahsa Alimardani, the associate director of the Technology Threats & Opportunities program at WITNESS, shared with The Verge that while the collage Trump posted appears to have been AI-modified, the women themselves are indeed real. Among them is Bita Hemmati, whose image had circulated in various right-leaning news outlets. Hemmati has been issued a death sentence by Branch 26 of the Tehran Revolutionary Court for allegedly acting against the Iranian government for the United States and hostile groups.

Alimardani identified six of the women—Bita Hemmati, Mahboubeh Shabani, Venus Hossein-Nejad, Golnaz Naraghi, Diana Taherabadi, and Ghazal Ghalandri—while the identities of the remaining two, Panah Movahedi and Ensieh Nejati, are yet to be confirmed. The identified women were involved in anti-government protests in January. Apart from Hemmati, none are reported to have received death sentences.

The entire episode lays bare the propensity for misinformation on all sides—Trump’s readiness to share dubious claims and Iran’s tendency to manipulate narratives or trivialize genuine political prisoners to undermine the U.S. Both contribute to a complex web of geopolitical posturing and misinformation.

The additional wrinkle is that the account mocking Trump for coming to the rescue of “8 AI-generated women” is the very same one that landed South Korean president Lee Jae-myung in hot water when he quoted a misleading labeled video posted by that account. Israeli officials have accused the account of being “well-known for spreading disinformation.” The case of the sketchy Lee Jae-myung quote-post is a story of mingled truth and misinformation, where the post got facts very wrong, but the video — of Israeli Defense Forces soldiers shoving a limp body off a rooftop in Gaza — was real, documenting an event that possibly implicates Israeli forces in a violation of international law.

The case of the eight Iranian protesters also features that same mingling of fact and fiction into a fuzzy distortion that fuels an endless disputation of real human rights violations. Their lives have been reduced to glossy pixels and quote-dunks, the stuff of propaganda and parody. While known liars fight with each other on the internet about who these women are and what will happen to them, they — verifiably six of them, at least — remain real people who exist beyond the Iranian internet blackout.