I’ve been asked, what percentage of Iranians I think are pro existing regime ?
In short, there is no way of knowing it for sure.
Presidency elections are not a good measure because many of us were voting with the hope to help make things better. I personally still had faith in change within the regime until 2017. Also they are the ones counting and announcing the results so they get to fabricate the numbers with no hassle. Still in the last election they announced only 48.8٪ of eligibles voted and void votes came in second with 13٪ of the votes.
They always wanted us to believe that they are more than what they are; they own and/or control and sensor “all” media closely: books (even translated ones), cinema, all internal TV channels, magazines, news papers, etc. For example, there is no way a newspaper can post a criticism of the regime without being shut down the next day.
They don’t let people have a peaceful demonstration, so you don’t know those who are not coming out are rightfully afraid of being shot or having themselves and their family members arrested/turtuerd/harassed or they are simply just okay with the current system!
If you join their club/cult(it is called Basij) you can get into college easier but still I don’t think they are more than 10% of the total students (Based on my personal observations. Couldn’t find any official numbers on it)
They pay some and force the others for their demonstrations. Like if you work in a government related company you may get fired if you don’t join their demonstrations. Still we see less and less people are joining them and sometimes they need to use old footage related to something else to fake the crowd.
They also came up with the cyber army idea a couple years ago which is basically just fake accounts and bots on social media so we can’t even count the online presence.
That’s the real reason they shut down not only the Internet but mobile communications in the time of protests to keep people separated, keep us in the dark on how many we actually are?
So I don’t really know. Just seeing how hard they try to keep the numbers and statistics hidden, I’d say there are not many of them among civilians!
But this time I don’t even care. No matter how many of us are inside and outside of the country, they don’t get to kill us, kill our kids without any consequences!