Some reports claim the Iranian uprising seems to be subsiding after a week, in no small part due to violence unleashed by the two regimes in Tehran, plus an extensive program of suppression and sabotage on the Internet.
Iran seems to have learned, as China did after Tiananmen Square, that preventing people from getting organized online is vitally important for preventing the kind of preference cascade that brings authoritarian regimes down.
Organization is essential to sustaining mass protest movements, especially in countries where violent reprisals from the government are a very real possibility. The other great benefit of online interaction is the way it helps dissidents realize they are not alone. They learn opposition to the system is more widespread than they were led to believe. They no longer feel like isolated malcontents in a sea of loyalists and informers. The result is a “preference cascade” that quickly swells the ranks of dissident movements and makes unthinkable change suddenly appear feasible.
Heading such a process off at the pass is very important for suppressing protest movements, especially when they are filled with young people who are curious about the world, skilled at using the Internet, and naturally inclined to network with each other. The current Iranian protest movement is notably younger, more diverse, and more decentralized than the Green Revolution of 2009 was.
The Iranian government accordingly took swift action to sabotage the protest movement’s online presence, beginning with a block on the popular secure messaging site Telegram. Wired notes that nearly half the population of Iran relies on Telegram as a way to “talk to each other away from the prying eyes of their government,” and a quarter of the population uses it every day.
Wired relates that the Iranian government originally asked Telegram to play ball with its censorship demands, beginning with a not-unreasonable request to shut down a channel that was calling for gun attacks on Iranian police, a clear Telegram terms-of-service violation.
When the Iranian government escalated its demands and called for shutting down more channels used by regime opponents, Telegram’s management refused, and the entire service was blocked in Iran. Other services like Instagram and Signal were blocked soon afterward.
Like other repressive governments, Iran developed a quick and dirty system for blocking websites by simply adding their IP addresses to a blacklist. They also aggressively used online resources to intimidate citizens, through such tactics as sending them smartphone messages telling them to stay away from demonstrations and letting it be known that people coordinating with the protest movement online could be identified and tracked down.
The Iranian government has also done a good job of preventing information from reaching the outside world, following a flurry of viral phone videos at the beginning of the uprising. Many of those videos were distributed through Telegram, so they naturally grew more scarce after the service was blocked. International news organizations have difficulty getting accurate information about how many people have been killed or arrested.
It is possible to use certain networking techniques to bypass censorship systems like Iran’s, but doing so requires much more effort and technical skill than signing up for a fairly simple platform like Telegram, which works on smartphones and computers alike. This dramatically reduces the number of people who can communicate and organize quickly during a moment of political unrest.
Even migrating to other systems that work as well as Telegram shakes off a huge number of participants in a protest movement because it is difficult for a large number of people to settle on a single new platform and reconnect with each other. It is very difficult to compensate for the loss of a communications system that half the country was using.
Meanwhile, the regime staged well-organized counter-protests, complete with pre-printed signs. Regime mouthpieces denounced the uprising as “sedition” and spread the narrative that it was a nefarious plot by foreign agents: the Israelis, the Sunni kingdoms led by Saudi Arabia, and of course the Great Satan of the United States. In a somewhat novel touch, fingers of blame have also been pointed at former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has become a thorn in the side of the government after a failed political comeback attempt last year.
The regime made a point of claiming that, contrary to appearances, the protest movement was very small. “There were a maximum of 1,500 people in each place, and the number of troublemakers did not exceed 15,000 people nationwide,” said Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps General Mohammad Ali Jafari on Thursday.
“It wasn’t immediately clear if the drop in reports of new demonstrations challenging Iran’s theocratic government meant the protests were subsiding or that the authorities’ blocking of social media apps had managed to stop protesters from offering new images of rallies,” the Associated Press observed.
Keeping a lid on things in the capital of Tehran also helped sustain the image of a small, scattered, exhausted movement. The more widespread nature of the current uprising seemed like a promising difference from the Tehran-centered Green Revolution at first, but it would obviously become harder for people in far-flung towns to coordinate with each other once the Internet was blocked, compared to the 2009 demonstrators pouring out of buildings in heavily-populated Tehran and bumping into each other in the streets.
Taken together, the Iranian government’s measures reversed the preference cascade, as protesters went back to feeling alone and outnumbered, nervous that a high price would be paid for defiance and uncertain that an army of like-minded dissidents would gather around them.
It is a strategy authoritarian regimes around the world have perfected for dealing with popular uprisings in the Information Age. “It’s about preventing networking and preventing people from making meaningful connections,” as Sanam Vakil of Chatham House told Wired.
“Iran’s security and stability depend on its own people, who – unlike the peoples of Trump’s regional ‘BFFs’ – have the right to vote and to protest,” sneered Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on Twitter. “These hard-earned rights will be protected, and infiltrators will not be allowed to sabotage them through violence and destruction.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. Iran is one of the most repressive and restrictive governments in the world. Amnesty International on Thursday called upon Iran to halt its “increasingly ruthless crackdown,” thoroughly investigate the deaths of protesters, respect the human rights of the hundreds who have been arrested, stop threatening a more vicious crackdown to intimidate the public, and restore blocked Internet sites.
Also on Thursday, the European Commission condemned “the unacceptable increase of violence and loss of human lives” in Iran and stressed that “peaceful demonstration and freedom of expression are fundamental rights that apply to every country.”
Unfortunately, the regime is unlike to walk the walk of human rights and free expression when all it has to do is talk the talk.