One of the main promises of the Pezeshkian administration was to lift the filtering of social media platforms. In recent months, reformists have tried to achieve a symbolic success for the unsupported Pezeshkian administration by lifting the ban on some social networks amidst the current crises. However, despite all these efforts, the administration’s achievements have been minimal and met with intense criticism from opponents and detractors. This lack of success in aligning other branches of power persists, even though statistics show that filtering has not significantly influenced user behavior, nor have domestic platforms been able to compete with foreign ones. So why does the insistence on maintaining filtering persist?

To understand the motives behind authoritarian governments’ actions, two aspects can be distinguished: first, decision-making for personal interests, and second, the political establishment’s understanding of the overall interests of the authoritarian system. For example, oral history reports from Harvard reveal that, in some cases, military leaders showed interest in purchasing specific types of weaponry due to bribes, or civilian leaders justified or signed certain economic contracts for personal gain. In today’s Iran, economic corruption seems to significantly influence officials’ actions in various areas. It is well-known that filtering enforcers are linked to or even the same as VPN sellers. But the other aspect of the issue is the preservation of the authoritarian regime’s survival and interests. As observed in policymakers’ behavior, security threats always drive them toward more extensive filtering. Below, we explore the security-related reasons for filtering from the regime’s perspective.

A) Big Data and the Big Brother

With the expansion of the internet and its integration into human lives, nearly all of our activities—financial transactions, travel, interests, quality of social media engagement, and even personal matters—leave a trail. For example, when you pay for purchases with a bank card or settle the fare for a ride-hailing service via your phone, the banks record your spending patterns. Similarly, internet searches and social media activity—ranging from your interests to the time spent watching content—are logged. These accumulated data provide their holders with insights that were previously unimaginable and unobtainable by any other means.

The availability and analysis of such data profoundly affect our lives. Those who control big data not only know our interests but can also influence them. For instance, by leveraging big data, they can determine how to persuade an individual to purchase a product or vote for a particular candidate. Big data achieves this power by analyzing the behavior of individuals similar to you—those with similar age, gender, and online habits who tend to purchase certain products. Beyond this, system designers expose users to different options and observe their reactions. These observations help designers understand user behavior. For example, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz writes about how social networks use such insights:
“Facebook has become a platform designed to make people spend more time on it… Game designers can give gamers different missions and determine which ones most addict them to the game… to the point where we encounter games that trap many adult men in their parents’ basements, playing incessantly.”

Brian Clegg, author of Big Data, writes about the political implications of such tools:
“Imagine that in the future, a malicious power buys Facebook and decides to influence your country’s elections. The power lies in their hands…”

The control granted by big data, especially when coupled with artificial intelligence, has introduced a formidable new form of tyranny. Many thinkers have discussed the dangers of big data owners’ tyranny, painting a picture of tomorrow’s world not as one dominated by authoritarian governments but by social media networks and search engines.

Many researchers in this field fear the connection of big data collected by various entities with governments. They even consider access to big data by democratic governments problematic and a violation of civil rights, as tools capable of predicting a crime at a location or by a person can also predict a citizen’s dissent or political actions in a specific place. Now imagine such power in the hands of an authoritarian government. Life under such a regime would closely resemble George Orwell’s 1984. In this scenario, the regime would not only have complete knowledge of your life but also know your inclinations, predict your future actions, and manipulate you into willingly performing actions it desires.

In Iran, the regime seeks to control such tools to eliminate concerns about an empowered society challenging its authority. For this purpose, domestic platforms must replace all foreign social networks that collect big data. These domestic alternatives must operate in complete coordination with the government. In this scenario, e-commerce websites, search engines like Google, internet services like ride-hailing apps, messaging platforms like Telegram or WhatsApp, and navigation systems like Waze or Google Maps must have domestic counterparts aligned with the government’s agenda, with Iranian access to foreign platforms cut off. The concepts of a “national internet,” filtering foreign platforms, and replacing them with domestic alternatives can be interpreted as steps toward this goal.

These measures have significantly impacted authoritarian governments like China and Russia. For example, a 2013 study found that regardless of individuals’ political views or their support for or opposition to Putin’s government, users of Russian social networks held a more positive perception of the country’s election integrity. However, the penetration of domestic platforms in Russia and China is far greater than in Iran. The Islamic Republic’s authoritarian regime seems unaware of its differences from these governments and insists on maintaining filtering, perhaps under the illusion that it can achieve the same level of control as China and Russia.

B) Security Concerns and Unpredictability

Helen Margetts, Peter John, Scott Hale, and Taha Yasseri, authors of Political Turbulence, demonstrate through various studies that the internet has changed the way political collective actions form. In the past, social movements required leadership and organization, but today, the internet provides an environment where activists can be encouraged to take collective action rapidly and without leadership or organization. Authoritarian regimes, which have long sought to suppress civil society and prevent political protests, are unwilling to leave the internet and cyberspace as an unpredictable tool for collective actions and see it as essential to limit or control this space.

C) Globalization and National Sovereignty

A few centuries ago, empires—the dominant form of governance for millennia—began to collapse, and by a few decades ago, no empires remained, replaced by nation-states. At the same time, the waves of secularization, the weakening of religious institutions, and the decline of large landowners due to modernization, Marxist revolutions, or land reforms in various countries granted states unrivaled power, making them the sole political actors on national and global stages. However, the nation-state honeymoon did not last long, as globalization arrived in all its dimensions. Now, multinational corporations, internet tools, and even global civil organizations hold more power than many governments.

In this phase, a struggle exists between globalization advocates and opponents, as well as between nation-states and sprawling platforms and organizations. Tensions between Facebook and the U.S. government can be analyzed within this framework. Naturally, less powerful governments have less ability to preserve their national sovereignty, and authoritarian regimes have even less legitimacy for negotiation. Thus, the Iranian regime lacks the capacity for negotiation and resorts to filtering.

The problem with Iran’s authoritarian regime is its attempt to emulate China and Russia’s models, despite vastly different circumstances in terms of society and governance. Politically, citizens in these countries tend to be more compliant with their governments. Economically, China’s decades of growth and Putin’s success in pulling Russia out of the crises of the 1990s have granted their regimes more legitimacy. Additionally, factors such as state-owned economies, technical and industrial capabilities, and relatively competitive economies empower these governments to control the internet, making domestic platforms in these countries much more popular than in Iran.

Thus, it seems the authoritarian regime in Iran will eventually have to abandon its repeated failures in implementing these projects, which not only violate citizens’ rights but also significantly harm Iran’s economy, development, and even its security. Before declining legitimacy strips them of the opportunity to act, they must launch a broad liberalization initiative across civil, political, and internet spaces.