The “Janfada for Iran” campaign has, in recent weeks, become one of the Islamic Republic’s propaganda tools for displaying loyalty and social mobilization. Officials and state affiliated media have described the campaign as a plan for people to “declare their readiness” in the face of foreign threats, presenting the website janfadaa.ir as the registration portal for citizens. On April 7, 2026, Mehr News Agency reported that Masoud Pezeshkian had also joined the campaign and claimed that, by that point, more than 14.2 million people had declared their readiness for “self sacrifice.” A few days later, state affiliated media raised the figure further. The state broadcaster reported nearly 30 million registrations, and the same number was then turned into state media headlines claiming that the “Janfada for Iran army has reached 30 million.”

The campaign was not confined to inside the country. The Islamic Culture and Relations Organization announced that a separate website, janfada.net, had been launched for the registration of Iranians abroad. In this way, people over the age of 12, even outside the country, could register online or through the Islamic Republic’s cultural missions. The announcement described the campaign’s objective as “declaring the readiness of the people of Iran to play an effective role in confronting the American Zionist enemy.” In this sense, Janfada was not merely an online form. It was part of a digital media operation and cyber propaganda campaign designed to turn a large number into a sign of legitimacy, internal cohesion, and social readiness under wartime conditions.

Before the term “Janfada” (Life Pledged) was repackaged as a state propaganda program, it had gained currency in the television programs of a senior journalist at Iran International, as an emotional and nationalist expression used to commemorate citizens killed on January 8 and 9, 2026. Veisi has said that the public embrace of the phrase “A Son of Iran, Life Pledged to the Homeland” reflects society’s turn toward Iranian values and its distance from the frameworks of the Islamic Republic. But in the “Janfada campaign,” the Islamic Republic has not merely created a new slogan. It has tried to appropriate a phrase that had acquired an emotional, national, and anti state meaning in the public sphere of opponents and Persian language media, and to convert it into the language of state mobilization, political loyalty, and readiness to play a role in a security conflict.

In the latest reaction, however, the Islamic Republic’s embassy in London has invited Iranians living in the United Kingdom to register in this program for “self sacrifice.” Official notices from the Islamic Republic’s missions explicitly state that Iranians abroad can enter the Mikhak system using their national ID number and select the “Janfada campaign” option. The issue, therefore, is not merely a symbolic campaign. It is the connection of a project of political mobilization and loyalty screening to the official infrastructure used to identify and provide consular services to Iranians abroad. British media have examined this trend from the perspective of the potential identification, categorization, and organization of Islamic Republic supporters on British soil, and have pointed to security experts’ concerns about online radicalization and the possible use of this network for actions in favor of the Islamic Republic. This point must be stated carefully: registering in such a campaign does not, in itself, mean membership in a terrorist network. But the combination of the language of “self sacrifice,” the state run Mikhak platform, the embassy’s call, and the Islamic Republic’s record of transnational threats makes it a security warning sign.

Systematic Number Inflation and Exaggeration

In this propaganda environment, Ali Sharifi Zarchi, a former professor at Sharif University of Technology and a specialist in artificial intelligence and data, published a technical review of the janfadaa.ir website and placed its documentation in a public GitHub repository. In this review, he showed that the website uses an Ajax service at https://janfadaa.ir/ajax, with the parameter action=getComments, to display user messages. According to the sample output documented in the repository, this service returns records containing id, fullname, description, and date, and the highest visible identifier at the time of the review was 3,913,777. This figure is fundamentally distant from the claim of more than 30 million registrations.

The importance of Sharifi Zarchi’s work was that he did not stop at observing the numbers. He tried to show the relationship between the registration form and the website’s public output. State affiliated media responded by saying that these identifiers referred to “comments,” not registrants. But in the GitHub documentation, Sharifi Zarchi refers to a snapshot of the website’s JavaScript file and shows that, during registration, data such as mobile number, full name, province, city, date of birth, gender, education level, and description are sent to the server. Since the Ajax output also returns the shared fields fullname and description, along with id and date, his argument is that id is the identifier of a record registered in the database, not merely the identifier of an independent message separate from the registration process.

Media close to the government also reacted quickly to this analysis. Khabar Online, citing the internet newspaper Faraz, argued that Sharifi Zarchi had conflated the “total number of registrants” with the “number of people who wrote comments,” and claimed that, in the website’s technical architecture, the identifiers in question referred only to published comment rows.

In the technical review of the published repository on the Janfada website, the most important sign of number inflation is the separation between the advertised number and the website’s verifiable data. The website and its supporting media have spoken of “more than 30 million registrations,” but the public endpoint used to retrieve messages returns identifiers whose highest documented value is 3,913,777. If this identifier is the identifier of the registration record, then the raw ceiling of the records that can be substantiated in the website’s data structure is not 30 million, but less than four million. The importance of this finding is that the output fields of the same endpoint, including id, fullname, description, and date, overlap with the data that the registration form sends to the server from the client side. There is also only one form on this website: “On this website, there is only one registration form in which the user, after entering full name, mobile phone number, province, city, date of birth, gender, and education level, most of which are optional, can optionally enter a comment or user message. The comment can be empty or contain a short text.” Therefore, an explanation that presents this identifier merely as a “comment ID” is not consistent with the technical evidence found in the code and the server response.

The second layer of the issue is the way data is displayed and hidden. While the official claim is built on tens of millions of registrations, the crawler published in the same repository was able to extract only 1,654 accessible records from the website’s public service. Even within this limited data, large gaps are visible. For example, the oldest record has the identifier 117 and was registered on Farvardin 8, 1405, while the next record has the identifier 1,803,827 and dates to Farvardin 19. This means that over an 11 day period, about 1.8 million identifiers are missing from public view. Such a pattern shows that the website has not provided a transparent and auditable database of registrations, nor has it offered even an explainable sampling method for displaying messages. In practice, the total number has been presented as propaganda, while the raw data needed to verify it remains outside public reach.

The third sign is the existence of unnatural repetitions within the same small visible sample. Repetition of short slogans in online campaigns can be natural to some extent. But the repetition of long and specific texts, with identifiers far apart and on different dates, strengthens the possibility of repeated registrations or mass generation of records.

Thus, although it is not possible from the outside to calculate the real number of unique users with certainty, it is possible to say that the claim of “30 million registrations” is not supported by the visible data, the website’s technical structure, the highest observed identifiers, the record gaps, or the unnatural repetitions. From a verification perspective, this is not a transparent and auditable statistic, but an example of propaganda number making: a large number for media consumption, without the possibility of independent review, without access to raw data, and without a clear mechanism for distinguishing real registrations, repeated records, and displayed messages.