The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is my excellent colleague Ehsan Dehghan, whose focus is on the current situation in Iran. Iran’s media ecosystem is tightly controlled by the regime, with many social media platforms banned but accessible via VPNs and other workarounds.
Current protests in Iran are only the latest in a long series of anti-regime protests that date back at least as far as 1999, often over regime censorship, election fraud, the economic situation, and regime violence towards women and other groups. The protests appear to be getting more frequent, and the crackdowns more violent.
The latest protests occurred since late 2025, and began as economic protests; these spread across the country, with slogans directly targeting the regime. The regime cracked down brutally on protesters, and deaths were severely underreported (curiously recycling the same number of deaths several times in different contexts). Internet access was blacked out during this time, but footage of the mass murders committed by the regime nonetheless leaked out.
Anti-regime actors documented much of this in whatever ways they could, while pro-regime actors spread their own narratives, in both cases especially also through Telegram; an analysis of the major channels shows the impact especially of the January 2026 Internet blackout (though some channels are operated from outside of Iran and stayed active).
Even regime channels were disconnected, but some other pro-regime channels operated from within Iran remained active; these are largely connected to the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), and may well be operated from the same physical location.
Anti-regime channels kept up a running narrative covering the brutal regime crackdown; pro-regime channels focussed on unrelated topics like the US attack on Venezuela, food stamps, or school closures, and only covered the protests as a secondary issue, using terms like riots, terrorists, and Mossad to spread the claim that the protests were organised by the Israeli secret service.
Such noise, confusion, and repetition, combined with their institutional authority, leads to a repetition of such claims in mainstream western news reporting about the Iran protests; such reporting also includes the numbers of deaths reported by the government, if with the caveat that such numbers could not be verified. Combined with the relative global silence on these protests, this means that these events remain severely underreported.
