Dropping Out // How Iran’s Telegram Ban Affects Marginalised Communities
The debate around filtering has played a prominent role in Iranian domestic political discourse over the last few years. The battle between Rouhani’s administration and judiciary officials has been ongoing since 2013, with the filtering of platforms like Telegram always high on the agenda. Rouhani indicated repeatedly during his re-election campaign in 2017 that a vote for him would be a vote to safeguard the internet from censorship and surveillance.
There’s a reason internet freedom has remained high up the national agenda for such a long period: the ubiquity of Telegram.
For many Iranians, Telegram is not just a messaging app; it’s a social network, a primary source of news and media content, and a thriving hub of online commerce. Its influence really cannot be understated, with more than 40 million users in Iran prior to the filtering order of April 2018.
In this edition of Filterwatch, we’ll explore some of the particular challenges that this filtering order poses for marginalised populations in Iran, including low-income citizens, disabled people, and rural communities.
Turning Out The Lights // Iran’s Telegram Ban
When Rouhani’s new ICT Minister Mohammad-Javad Azari Jahromi first came into office, he appeared set on protecting Telegram from the hardliners’ censorial instincts. However, protests in December and January provided officials with the justification they were seeking to place a temporary block on the platform.
Although the Rouhani administration appeared to vocally oppose the ban during and after its imposition, they offered little in the way of reassurance that they would be willing — or indeed able — to resist future threats to the accessibility of Telegram.
This signposted the government’s non-response last month, when Bijan Ghassemzadeh, a judge sitting on the Tehran Media Court, blocked the platform once again. Both Jahromi and Rouhani both failed to effectively condemn or oppose the measure, and it appears that the filtering of Telegram may end up being a permanent measure.
In recent years, whenever there has been a threat to Telegram, most of us in the internet freedom community have focused on the threats that exist to freedom of speech, access to information, and individual privacy. Given the widespread usage of Telegram by activists and civil society actors in Iran, these concerns are urgent and valid.
In recent months, the impacts of the filtering of Telegram upon small businesses has also been discussed at length. The issue was at first raised during the temporary ban on Telegram earlier this year, when a group of small businesses spoke out on Twitter to share their stories about how the ban has affected their trade.
The campaign was so effective at raising the issue that in the week prior to the judiciary’s decision to filter Telegram, officials attempted to assure Iranians that the impact on businesses was being considered. In a strange intervention Abolhassan Firouzabadi, the Secretary of the Supreme Council of Cyberspace (SCC), claimed that those losing their jobs due to the filtering of Telegram would be entitled to unemployment insurance.
Such guarantees are insufficient. The Iranian government is failing those on the margins by not considering the wider effects of the Telegram ban upon the lives and livelihoods of citizens who depended on the app’s services and functionalities. Let’s now consider the users who have been most adversely affected by this ban, and highlight some challenges that we feel should be centred by the broader digital rights community.
Anybody Home? // Telegram’s Surviving User Base
Significantly, it now seems as though the impact of the Telegram ban has not been as great as the judiciary may have hoped. ICT Minister Jahromi recently used his Instagram channel to publish a graph showing an initial drop in the use of Telegram in the first few days following the ban. However, it also shows that Telegram appeared to regain a significant proportion of its user base in mid-May.
Social media users and commentators have rightly pointed at this trend as evidence that VPNs have neutered the judiciary’s filtering policies and retained Telegram access for large segments of the population.
This is broadly in line with the prevailing media narrative that describes how young and savvy Iranian internet users have been sidestepping filtering policies for years.
Yet while this may hold true for a majority of Iranian users, it must be acknowledged that filtering will affect marginalised communities in different ways, potentially locking them out of the platform in the long-term.
Left Behind // The User Groups Facing Exclusion
First, we must acknowledge that Iran’s boasts about high levels of internet connectivity do not paint the full picture of access across Iran. Although it is true that in recent years there has been a rise in internet access via smartphones in Iran, Jahromi has noted that 27 million mobile SIM card subscribers still lack access to smartphones.
The continuing popularity of internet cafes nationwide also attests to the continued lack of internet access via personal devices. In this light, government boasts about investment in domestic applications is illustrative of authorities’ disregard for the variety of ways that citizens — and especially marginalised citizens — often experience the internet.
It should also be noted that recent attacks on net neutrality have also affected how marginalised groups experience this ban on Telegram. As we outlined in our May 2017 report, Iran is seeking to incentivise usage of domestically produced and hosted content by providing users with 50% discounts on data tariffs while accessing selected items of domestically hosted content. Iranians using VPNs to bypass filtering will also miss out on these discounts — a policy that could provide further disincentives for accessing unrestricted media among segments of society that already find the cost of internet access near-prohibitive.
A number of third-party developers had also developed forked versions of Telegram that provided features serving disabled users. In September 2017, three university students in Iran created an accessible version of Telegram called ‘BlindGram’ which allowed people with visual impairments to use the app. It used the open API opportunity provided by Telegram to build a fork version meeting the needs of this community.
Comparatively, the current domestic apps backed and heavily financed by the government have not made any special adjustments in their design to accommodate users with disability, and have not opened their APIs to grant such opportunities to third-party developers. Although all tech companies have a moral duty to respect disabled users when developing their products, this becomes an even more serious issue when the apps are being developed with public resources.
Like businesses, smaller charities have also made use of Telegram in Iran. The network effect of Telegram enabled philanthropists and charity workers to create local networks of support for local groups. For example, one Telegram-based charity profiled by the newspaper Hamshahri used the Telegram channel @gheseh94–which had 1,739 members — to collect toys for children in need. It is unclear how the filtering of Telegram will affect the operations of NGOs such as these.
There are also other communities in Iran for which adequate access data is not currently available. Among these are the near-one million registered Afghan refugees in Iran who have faced systemic obstacles when it comes to accessing communication tools and services. For instance, challenges around obtaining identity documents and other residency documentation has reportedly contributed to difficulties in obtaining mobile SIM cards. This a significant population with its own unique needs which Iran must take into account when setting ICT policies.
The ban on Telegram will also negatively impact marginalised communities by impacting on the work of public services. Government service providers such as hospitals, universities and schools have also been using Telegram as a key channel for public outreach and engagement, and since the ban all these institutions have been asked to use domestic messaging apps. Little consideration appears to have been given to the potential impact of these restrictions upon public service efficiency, and on their reach to isolated communities who required on their Telegram channels for service information.
Our Challenge // Empowering Marginalised Users
The examples above demonstrate how Iran’s filtering policies will disproportionately impact upon marginalised communities. We maintain that the blocking of Telegram constitutes a clear threat to civic and political freedoms in Iran, and the online security of citizens. But alongside these wider concerns, we would emphasise the particular risks faced by those citizens who already exist on the state’s social and economic margins.
It also exposes a regrettable contradiction in Iranian ICT policy, for at the same time as the Rouhani administration boasts of expanding access and connectivity among populations on Iran’s margins, many of the newfound advantages of this connectivity within rural communities have been snatched away with the filtering of Telegram.
Iran’s digital rights community came into existence in the battle against internet censorship in the aftermath of the 2009 election, and in recent years has rallied against the spectre of surveillance and online information controls. But it is important for us to remember that the internet in Iran is more than a vehicle for political activism and free online expression. For millions of Iranians it has become central to their livelihoods, and to their experience of their local communities.
In this sense, our work is lent more urgency; not only must we continue to advocate for a free and secure internet, but we must also remain mindful that our work should support the connection and empowerment of those citizens living on the margins of Iran—those who may struggle with VPNs, who are newly online, and who ultimately have the most to lose from the judiciary’s blocking of Telegram.
This article is taken from Small Media’s April 2018 edition of Filterwatch, available here.
