Tor Project has a team that looks at relays and checks if relays are engaging in bad practices or any suspicious activity like a lot of nodes run by one operator.
Hiring people on something like fiverr could take care of most of the manual part.
My point is that if I could do it, a nation state cracking down on dissidents could likely do it too.
Iran really is not the first country that should come to anyone's mind given how far it is from home.