Weeks after the uprising in Iran turned violent, no one has been able to count the dead. The state has yet to lift the internet shutdown it launched on January 8, making the information blackout the longest and most severe one that Iranians have ever experienced. More than 90 million citizens have no internet access, which has made it impossible to know the true extent of the government’s violence against protesters. The few images that have leaked out, via Starlink-satellite connections or people who have left the country, reveal a brutal crackdown that has left thousands dead. “They are killing us. It’s carnage,” a friend in Iran wrote when she finally reached me through WhatsApp on January 17. Fellow Iranians in the diaspora tell me that they have received similar messages.
This communication void has left Iranians paralyzed, in and outside Iran. For more than two decades, Iranians have used the internet, social media, and satellite-TV technology to build a vibrant public sphere beyond the strict regulatory parameters of the state. In everyday acts of posting and circulating non-state-aligned content, Iranians have normalized all that the regime forbids, including poetry readings, impromptu street concerts, and images of parents mourning children killed in protests. Although the state has blocked most foreign social-media apps, platforms, and news websites; introduced more censorship and surveillance; and raised fees to access the internet, Iranians have managed to use this alternative media sphere to push the boundaries of permissible public speech. Now there are fears that even if internet services return, they will likely be under stricter state control.
Iran was an early adopter of email and the internet. The government invested in and promoted their use in the 1990s as a way to advance academic research and boost the economy after the war with Iraq. By the turn of the 21st century, ordinary Iranians were patronizing internet cafés—Tehran alone had about 1,500 by 2001—and meeting in online chat rooms. In these lively virtual spaces, they discovered they could create a freer, more secular, and more democratic world beyond the suffocating politics and economics of the Islamic Republic.
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During the country’s 2009 Green Movement, Iranians used virtual spaces to help coordinate protests and consolidate their support for political reforms. Songs such as “Yar-e Dabestani-ye Man” (“My Elementary Schoolmate”) circulated on phones and blogs, conjuring visions of a gentle, united march toward political progress.
The state responded by creating the Internet Police and other intelligence units to monitor online spaces. The government had long shied away from a total internet ban in part because it seemed too economically costly, given just how many Iranian businesses rely on online communications. Despite restrictions on X, Telegram, Instagram, and other social-media apps, most Iranians know how to circumvent these measures and have been active users.
Even with the regime’s curbs on communication, egregious acts of repression have led to mass outrage, first online and then in the streets. When a young woman named Mahsa Jina Amini died in police custody in 2022 after being arrested for improper veiling, the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising erupted, in part because Iranians had spent years nurturing a collective vision online of Iran’s future—one that included a living wage, political freedom, dancing in the streets, care for the environment, and compassion for Afghan-refugee children. These wistful desires were faithfully captured in Shervin Hajipour’s song “Baraye,” which poetically described “the longing for an ordinary life,” became an instant anthem for the uprising, and went on to win a 2023 Grammy for Best Song for Social Change. The state ultimately repressed this uprising, but also loosened some of its rules. Women effectively won the battle over headscarves. Many now go without.
The pervasiveness of the alternative public sphere online eventually led the state to create its own productions and flood these spaces with state-aligned talk shows. The regime’s supporters also engage in online spaces, and social media offers the state a way to spy on its subjects and punish any influencers who become too famous or subversive.
These efforts have hardly curbed skepticism of the regime. One viral Instagram clip of an online show featured a young man with the kind of beard and suit that many associate with the regime. He observed that the Islamic Republic “no longer has its people by its side like before,” adding, “Regimes fall in minds before they fall in actuality.” Many interpreted this clip to mean that the regime was bleeding support even among loyalists. Another clip of a state-sanctioned online show circulated on social media had students debating an official who supported enforcing the hijab; one student asked, “Who gives the right to the government to interfere in the personal freedoms of the people?”
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Much like social media elsewhere, the relative openness of these online Persian-language spaces has made them vulnerable to conspiracy theorists, state-backed disinformation campaigns, and foreign meddlers. For example, vocal royalists in the diaspora who went years without much support in or outside Iran now find themselves bolstered by foreign efforts to foment regime change by promoting the monarchy. Reports in late 2025 revealed an Israeli-funded online Persian-language campaign promoting Reza Pahlavi, the son of the former shah of Iran. The enormously popular satellite-TV channel Iran International, which regularly covers Pahlavi’s speeches and supporters, is reportedly funded by Saudis.
Perhaps these foreign-backed influence campaigns helped lay the groundwork for the growing call in Iran for a return to a monarchy. Extreme U.S. sanctions and the June 2025 war with Israel have further compromised the regime’s position by causing the rial to crash. But the Islamic Republic is ultimately to blame for calls for regime change, given its decades-long intransigence to demands for reform, its crackdown on dissidents, and its woeful economic mismanagement and corruption.
As the death count rises from the state’s violent response to peaceful protests, the Islamic Republic’s internet blackout has proved more insidious. In shutting down all of the online spaces where Iranians have found ways to dream, build, connect, and organize, the state has seized control over the country’s narrative and suppressed all avenues for hope—for now. Still, Iranians have spent years cultivating a reality beyond the state’s ideological strictures. If they can no longer enjoy the liberties of this virtual world, perhaps Iranians will be only more motivated to pursue these freedoms in the real one.
