May 26, 2018
The Judiciary, which is not supposed to have anything to do with determining what social media can operate in Iran, has banned the Telegram messaging app from the country.
But it remains unclear how effective the ban really is.
President Rohani vocally opposed any ban on Telegram and he seems to have prevailed in the committee that is empowered to ban websites and social media.
However, the Judiciary then took it upon itself on April 30 to order Telegram blocked or “filtered” in Iran.
Telecommunications Minister Mohammad-Javad Azari-Jahromi denounced the move, saying it wouldn’t work. “Even if we ban the use of some software, other software will be found and information will start to circulate freely again,” he said. “Technology is not intrinsically guilty, corrupt or deviant. It is human beings who misuse it to promote crime and corruption in the virtual world, just as they do in real life.”
Many people have said they are still able to access Telegram by using “virtual private networks” (VPNs), circumvention tools that can wheedle their way around state filters.
One user, Amir Seyedin, tweeted May 3, “When WeChat was blocked, everyone went over to Viber. When Viber was blocked, everyone joined Telegram. But when Telegram was blocked, no one went away. Everyone installed circumvention tools and continued to use it.”
Azari-Jahromi, the telecoms minister, said that Telegram usage plummeted in Iran after the ban was imposed, but was almost back up to its old level of usage just three weeks later because of the use of VPNs. He didn’t explain how he could know that since the whole point of VPNs is that they hide what the user is doing.
Many people feel the Judiciary’s order was chiefly an effort by that branch to strike a blow at President Rohani and embarrass him before his supporters.
Telegram was used by an estimated 40 million Iranians, or half the population, before the ban.
Under the law, online content in Iran is regulated by the institutions in charge of censorship, such as the Taskforce to Determine Instances of Criminal Content (TDICC), the main group that has ruled on blocking websites and banning social media firms for years.
TDICC’s members include security and media organizations, as well as representatives from the three branches of the government. The members would meet to rule on censorship and filtering requests and relay their decisions to the Telecommunications Infrastructure Company (TIC) for enforcement.
But the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) reported May 6 that Iran’s mobile phone operators and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) had changed their filtering systems, enabling them to directly block requests to access Telegram before they reached the TIC.
Shortly after the ban on Telegram was announced, conservative Iranian officials proclaimed it had been very successful.
Gholamali Jafarzadeh Imanabadi, a hardline lawmaker, said May 8, “After Telegram was filtered, one million of its 45 million Iranian members deleted the application.”
“Posting content on Telegram [among users in Iran] has dropped 40 percent and content views decreased 50 percent,” he added.
Telegram has not yet released figures on the impact of the ban on its service in Iran. So there is no way yet to confirm or deny Imanabadi’s evaluation. However, as a practical matter, his figures are irrelevant because of the widespread use of VPNs, which make it difficult or impossible to track whether Iranians are accessing Telegram in large numbers by going around the system.
CHRI, however, says some Iranian users complain the Internet as a whole has been butchered by the ban on Telegram. Mahdi Taghizadeh, a co-founder of the Iranian company Delion Foods, tweeted May 7, “In order to filter Telegram, they have messed up the Internet in the entire country. In fact, now the only thing that works is Telegram—but our whole business and livelihood have been wasted.”
Many modern businesses in Iran have used Telegram to receive orders from customers. If Telegram usage is denigrated by 20 percent, their business will likely drop by 20 percent. Many businesses—including food delivery services and taxi-summoning services—have been screaming since the action against Telegram.
Hardliners’ hostility to Telegram increased after the messaging app was used by many of the protestors during the unrest that broke out across Iran last December to spread word of street gatherings.
The Judiciary listed nine crimes it said Telegram was guilty of: 1—inciting racial and ethnic disputes; 2—collecting information from Iranian users and giving it to foreign bodies; 3—publishing and distributing pornography; 4—insulting Islamic sanctities and values; 5—publishing lies to shape public opinion; 6—e-trading of goods and currencies; 7—use by terrorist groups; 8—violations of intellectual property and fraud; 8—publishing propaganda against the Islamic Republic; and 9—causing individual harm.
Only Number 2 is something that Telegram could do; the other complaints are about things Telegram’s clientele can do.
The regime said Telegram users should now switch to Iranian messaging apps, such as Soroush, which is being heavily promoted. Iranians have liked Telegram because it is said to be very secure, with messages encrypted and thus unreadable by the regime. Soroush is not encrypted and its servers are all in Iran where the authorities can tap into messaging traffic.
The promoters of Soroush have produced a series of emojis that uses can apply in their messages. The emojis are built around a chador-clad cartoon figure.
Telegram has been used mainly in the Middle East and former Soviet Union. Iran has been the single largest user of Telegram by far. The app was created by a Russian, Pavel Durov, who has since left Russia and scattered Telegram’s servers around the world. The app is little used in North America.
Russia, where the app is also widely used, moved against Telegram several days before Iran and is trying to shut the app down.
