The Iranian YouTube Show Posing Questions Few Dare Ask

When the conservative American commentator Tucker Carlson sat down last year for a buzzy interview with Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, the unlikely encounter would most likely never have happened without the involvement of a tiny, independent Iranian outlet.

Mahdi Ahmadi, the founder of Azad, a six-person team that hosts debates in Tehran and publishes them on YouTube, pitched Mr. Carlson on the idea, he said, and then connected him with the president’s team.

This mediating role is a tightrope that Mr. Ahmadi and his team have become adept at walking over the past few years. Their YouTube channel has aired views that are deeply critical of Iran’s government, alongside those of people close to the authorities, attracting a large and growing online audience, as well as scrutiny and criticism.

Mr. Carlson did not respond to a request for comment for this article, but his channel did thank Mr. Ahmadi for his help at the end of the Pezeshkian interview.

Mr. Ahmadi, 35, said in an interview with The New York Times that he saw Azad’s role as sitting between two opposing sides and creating a chance for mutual understanding — and allowing viewers to judge each side’s arguments for themselves.

“We believe that, for the future of Iranian society, this is essential,” he said.

Crucial to Azad’s approach is Mr. Ahmadi’s studious impartiality as a moderator. He has described the channel as a neutral “court of ideas” where viewers could be exposed to, and ***ess, an ideologically diverse set of perspectives.

This year, Azad hosted a debate in which one scholar advocated an end to Iran’s Islamic government via a constitutional referendum. Another went further — arguing for the return of the country’s exiled monarchy. Weeks earlier, Iranian security forces had killed thousands of antigovernment protesters, some of whom were calling for the return of the former crown prince, Reza Pahlavi.

Critics of the channel question how Azad has been allowed to continue working inside Iran, given the censorship and control that the state exerts over the media. Many ***ert that it must have protection from a powerful patron, which Mr. Ahmadi denies.

For the Iranian government, having a program like Azad inside Iran presents some benefits. State television, which has a monopoly on domestic airwaves, is controlled by hard-liners, and millions of Iranians instead get their news and entertainment from overseas Persian-language outlets, which can be stridently antigovernment.

By allowing some discourse within Iran, the government can attempt to dilute the influence of diaspora outlets while it also tries to shape those discussions.

Yet Azad (meaning “free” in Persian) has itself faced pressure from the state. Its website is blocked by the government, and Mr. Ahmadi said the authorities had interrogated him several times. During the June 2025 U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran, the authorities seized Azad’s equipment for 25 days, after it aired two programs about the conflict, Mr. Ahmadi said.

The channel has survived so far, he said, because of its refusal to take up an activist stance, and its balanced cast of guests, ranging from politicians to members of the opposition.

YouTube is also blocked by the government in Iran, but many people cir***vent the ban using virtual private networks (VPNs). Mr. Ahmadi estimates that around 70 percent of his channel’s audience is inside Iran, though it is difficult to know for sure because VPNs can mask a person’s location.

The government has also cut off access to the internet for long periods this year, amid m*** protests and war, disrupting the ability of Iranian YouTube creators to air new episodes.

Today, Azad has almost 160,000 subscribers, and its videos regularly receive six-figure viewerships. It is funded by crowdfunding and YouTube ads, according to Mr. Ahmadi, who has made open calls for donations to pay the bills.

Azad’s evenhanded approach is rare in Iranian media, in which news outlets are often aligned with political factions and some members of the opposition view traditional journalistic objectivity as a favor toward Iran’s government.

Mr. Ahmadi said it would be impossible for him to fully satisfy those suspicious of Azad.

The only effective answer, he said, was to show “over the long term that one can host diverse voices as much as possible, help increase their visibility and ultimately ask citizens to make use of whatever is valuable to them.”

A Rare Phenomenon

Azad’s roots stretch back over a decade. From 2014, Mr. Ahmadi organized in-person debates in a project called the Azad Fekri School (the School of Free Thought). The events were held at Tehran’s Sharif University of Technology, where he studied physics.

The discussions covered issues core to Iran’s state ideology, including compulsory hijab and “velayat-e faqih,” the political theory underpinning the system of clerical rule. Mr. Ahmadi has said he wanted opposing sides to talk to each other — not in raucous, gladiatorial debates, but in sober, lengthy presentations of each perspective, followed by dialogue.

It was a rare phenomenon in a country where the theocratic government has harshly punished those who question its ideology, and where even members of the opposition have grown impatient with each other, slinging insults back and forth online.

The debates set off controversy, and the university stopped allowing Azad Fekri School to use its facilities, Mr. Ahmadi said. Sharif University of Technology did not respond to a request for comment.

In 2022, the Azad team pivoted to YouTube. At the time, Iran was in the middle of the Woman, Life, Freedom protests, weeks of demonstrations prompted by the death of a woman in the custody of the morality police. Azad launched a series of conversations on the future of Iran, and the videos took off in popularity.

Since shifting online, Azad has hosted conversations with people who have fallen foul of the authorities, including an Iranian historian convicted and imprisoned under accusations of apostasy and the daughter of a former president who was jailed for her statements against the government. The American intellectual Noam Chomsky used his interview to speak of the need to “free Iranian society from the harsh, cruel, repressive clerical stranglehold of the clerical regime.”

Azad has also invited people onto the show who have positions in line with the government, including a cleric who led a body charged with promoting public morality, and ***ysts who advise Iran’s decision makers.

Mostafa Najafi, an ***yst close to Iran’s security policy circles who has appeared on Azad, said the program stood out for hosting guests with deep expertise. And, with debates commonly stretching to two or more hours, it gave them time to fully lay out their arguments, he said.

Abolfazl Hajizadegan, an Iranian sociologist, appeared on the program last year and criticized the government.

“I didn’t see any attempt to steer me or tell me to hold back,” he said. “That doesn’t mean they don’t have red lines, but in this difficult environment where producing content is hard, they show a degree of courage.”

That willingness to take risks is in part a keen business strategy. If the channel’s producers give in to self-censorship, their project is bound to fail, Mr. Ahmadi said on Tabaghe 16, a Persian-language podcast airing from Canada. “Who would watch it?” he said.

‘Politically Safe’ Pluralism?

Still, some observers remain skeptical of Azad’s work and motivations.

After decades of government repression, there is some exhaustion in Iran with calls for civility. The kind of respectful dialogue that Azad encourages has fallen out of fashion in some quarters of society.

Azad’s YouTube channel appears to show that, of more than 100 guests over the past year, only four have been women. It has held multiple all-male discussions on the issue of compulsory hijab, a law enforced against women in Iran.

Fatemeh H***ani, a sociologist in Iran, said that the gender imbalance of Azad’s guests reflected its alignment with government interests. After all, she said, women in Iran could speak from experience about the realities of state violence and discrimination.

“The platform wants to project an image of a pluralistic Iranian society, but only a form of pluralism that remains ‘politically safe,’” she said.

Mr. Ahmadi acknowledged that women were underrepresented on the show. He said that Azad regularly invited women to appear, but that they sometimes declined because they face greater political risk, their appearances are harshly scrutinized online, and they tend to be stricter about sticking to their areas of expertise than men.

For Mr. Hajizadegan, it is simplistic to argue that if a media platform is operating in Iran, it must be serving the regime. Even today, the state faces constraints on how it exercises power and is not the sole actor in Iran’s politics, he said.

“The fact that a media outlet remains open should be seen as good news, not something to suspect,” he said. “Saying this doesn’t preclude criticism. Rather, it opens the door for more serious, substantive critiques.”

Mr. Ahmadi accepts that Azad may fall short, and says that he welcomes critique. But he sees Azad as having already succeeded in pushing the boundaries of public discourse in Iran, a project he regards as vital to the country’s future.

“My agenda is dialogue,” Mr. Ahmadi said. “No political group in Iran can be erased. They must be able to talk to one another.”

Leily Nikounazar contributed reporting.