Last week, the Iranian government shut off the internet in most parts of Tehran and Kurdistan and blocked access to platforms such as Instagram and WhatsApp to suppress videos of the ongoing anti-regime protests from going viral.
Dissidents across the country have been protesting the death of a 22-year-old woman from alleged police torture after she was arrested by the Islamic Republic’s moral police for not properly wearing her headscarf. Within days, the protests and rallies spread to 146 cities in all 31 provinces, went viral on social media, and show no signs of ceasing. Across the border in Afghanistan, the de facto Taliban government, a group of militant Islamist jihadists who are themselves blocked from all Meta platforms, blocked TikTok insisting that such platforms were misleading the Afghan youth and inciting violence. In reality, this move attempts to stifle anti-Taliban voices and movements emerging on local social media and slowly getting noticed internationally, such as the #FreeHerFace and #BanTaliban hashtag campaigns that Afghans have been using to revolt online.
Previously, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Syria and US have made attempts at censoring the Internet or blocking certain social media platforms for various reasons. However, when such decisions come from authoritarian regimes, China and Russia included, there is a certain level of irony and malevolence attached to it, which only points towards the suppression of dissenting voices that are otherwise disseminated and amplified through social media.
The significance of social media for activism first became evident during the 2009 anti-regime protests in Iran that marked the beginning of what was later known as the Twitter Revolution. Later, during the Arab Spring – a wave of pro-democracy protests against the authoritarian governments in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain in 2010 and 2011 – social media and other digital platforms emerged to play a central role in protest communication and mobilisation. During the 2014 Umbrella Movement and the 2019-2020 Hong Kong protests, Twitter and Weibo (China’s version of Twitter) emerged as a virtual gathering place for the mainland Chinese dissident community.
Social media gives a platform to voices that need to be heard to be recognised, and links them to the broader public for pluralised storytelling. Under targeted state crackdowns on the internet and social media platforms, digital activism becomes vulnerable to political manoeuvring and dictatorial control of information, especially in cases where there aren’t a range of alternative options available to the public. Yes, social media cannot prevent authoritarian governments from cracking down on the protesters, but when violent repression occurs, at least the world is watching.
Ayesha Jehangir, CMT Postdoctoral Fellow
This was featured in our fortnightly newsletter of 30 September - Read our newsletter in full here. To subscribe, click here.