#nofilter? // How Iran Deals With Its Instagram ‘Influencers’
By Kaveh Azarhoosh and James Marchant
In July 2018, Iranians started publishing videos of themselves dancing on social media platforms to show solidarity with 18-year-old Maedeh Hojabri, who was arrested earlier that month for her own Instagram-based dance videos.
This isn’t the first time that such a case has grabbed international headlines — in 2014, in the early months of President Rouhani’s first term, a group of young Iranians were arrested for posting a YouTube video of themselves dancing to Pharrell Williams’ ‘Happy’. However, Maedeh’s arrest sparked a much wider public outcry.
The storm around Hojabri’s detention likely stemmed in part from her exceedingly high profile — at the time of her arrest, Maedeh’s Instagram account had around 600,000 followers. Nonetheless, on July 7, IRIB aired an interview with a young woman, in which she tearfully expresses her regret for posting unacceptable dance videos on Instagram. Although her face was obscured on the video, she was later identified as the young Instagram dance star.
The interview was rightly called out by observers as a forced confession. Although such videos have been a staple of state television’s moralising lectures for decades, IRIB’s parading of a 18-year old girl in front of the cameras was considered a particularly outrageous violation by the viewers. The incident caused such a stir that a number of public figures — including the leading reformist intellectual Zahra Rahnavard — spoke out in condemnation of the broadcast.
However, Maedeh’s arrest was viewed as doubly significant in the eyes of many owing to the fact that it came only a few days after Iranian judiciary officials talked of the possibility of filtering Instagram. On July 4, the First Deputy Attorney-General of Iran said that the filtering of Instagram had been placed on the judiciary’s agenda, and that action to censor the platform would be seriously considered.
Since the filtering of Telegram, Instagram casts a lonely figure as the last major global social media platform standing in Iran. Facebook, Telegram and Twitter all continue to experience systematic filtering and disruption. So is Instagram next?
That’s the questions we’ll try to dig into in this month’s edition of Filterwatch. Although there is no clear indication that the platform will be blocked, we could have said the same thing about Telegram a few short months ago.
Instagram is truly massive in Iran. It currently has an estimated user base of more than 20 million inside the country, and its position as the ‘last platform standing’ has meant that communities forced out of other spaces have started to use Instagram in increasingly innovative ways. In this month’s edition of Filterwatch, we’ll explore the role that Instagram plays for mainstream users and marginalised communities in Iran, and assess why certain segments of the Iranian establishment might want to see it disappear altogether.
Snapshot — The Rise and Rise of Instagram in Iran
It was in October 2014 that the Instagram page The Rich Kids of Tehran first cruised to national and international attention, showcasing the lives of North Tehran’s wealthiest, most Gucci-encrusted residents. Since then, Instagram has rapidly grown to be the social media platform of choice for a wide cross-section of Iranian society.
As in many other communities around the world, Instagram is first-and-foremost a place to share and view user-produced images and videos. In many ways comparable to the early 2000s surge of blogging in Iran, Instagram has opened up space for a surge in user-based content in a way that no other platform or app has, owing to its legal availability and its straightforward accessibility to anyone with access to a smartphone.
According to Cafe Bazaar — Iran’s leading marketplace for Android apps — there are more than 20 million active users of Instagram in Iran. Amazon’s Alexa also places Instagram as the fifth most-visited website in Iran, the only non-Iranian website in the top five apart from Google.
Not only is Instagram not banned in Iran, but it is actively used by Iranian officials too. President Rouhani’s verified channel has more than 2 million followers, while Supreme Leader Khamenei also seems to maintain an (unverified) channel of his own. Instagram plays a significant role in electoral competitions (see Small Media’s report #IranVotes 2017 for more on the role of Instagram during the 2017 presidential elections), and yet we would argue that its main function in Iran is for apolitical purposes, with many users seeing it as a space that offers the ability to express personal liberties which are not afforded to them elsewhere.
Star Power — Public Figures and Instagram
By circumventing traditional cultural and political gatekeepers, Instagram’s huge user base has provided celebrities and public figures with a means to share unmediated messages directly with the Iranian public.
One of the most prolific users of the platform is the actress Mahnaz Afshar, who has more than 7 million followers. While she does not cross any official legal boundaries in her posts, through her large user base she has gained the freedom to communicate with her fans and followers in the way that would not be permitted by official cultural platforms such as IRIB. For example, Afshar uses Instagram to discuss women’s rights and other social and political issues which — although they do not cross the ‘red lines’ of public discourse in the Islamic Republic — would likely not be possible to broadcast on state media.
Other celebrities, however, have used their reach to promote more sensitive political messages. The former footballer and national legend Ali Karimi used a June 2018 post to his 3.7 million followers to invite Iranians to boycott the purchase of consumer goods to protest high inflation. Karimi posted:
“Let’s not buy anything for one month; no gold coins, no vehicles — nothing which has turned expensive. Let’s get united once and for all, like other countries where people avoid purchasing goods after sudden jumps in prices. This will force the sellers to regulate the prices. Everyone stand up for this so that we can cut the hands off of the thieves and the middlemen”.
Even members of the Iranian political elite have made use of Instagram to bypass the usual media gatekeepers. During the 2017 presidential election, the Rouhani campaign relied on the functionalities offered by Instagram Live to broadcast discussion programmes in support of President Rouhani’s campaign which would otherwise likely not have been aired by IRIB.
Kaveh Madani, the former Deputy Director of Iran’s Department of the Environment was another example of an Iranian officials who has been prolific in their use of Instagram to get their messages out to the public without relying on traditional media. Since he was forced out of his post and into exile, he has remained active on Instagram and has used the platform to comment on environmental challenges.
High Exposure — Social Movements and Online Communities on Instagram
Given that all of the other online spaces for social organisation have been closed off, we’ve seen Instagram being used as a key space for the mobilisation of public-facing campaigns and marginalised communities.
One of the most influential Instagram-based campaigns developed in the past couple of years is the ‘My Stealthy Freedom’, pioneered by the US-based Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad. Alinejad has used her Instagram account with 1.7 million followers to promote crowdsourced videos from women inside Iran filming themselves protesting against the compulsory hijab. The related #whitewednesdays hashtag attracted more than 200 user videos in its first week, and it is hypothesised that this campaign fed into the protests later dubbed ‘The Girls of Revolution Street’, which were sparked off by the protest of Vida Movahed on Tehran’s Enghelab Street.
Not all subversive uses of Instagram are so heavily in the spotlight. Marginalised communities such as minority religious communities, LGBTQ citizens and cultural and linguistic minorities also use the platform to share resources, and to form a mixture of short- and long-term communities online.
Among the LGBTQ community, for example, short-lived ‘burner’ regional accounts function as gathering spaces for other anonymous burner user accounts to congregate, share information, and seek out connection (as discussed in Small Media’s 2018 report Breaking the Silence). At the same time, Persian-language Christian sermons are shared by anonymous users, as are minority language learning resources.
Fame! — Iran’s Instagram Influencers
Alongside the Iranian celebrities using Instagram to connect with their fandoms, the platform has created a whole new breed of Instagram superstars who are making names for themselves through their online content production. A huge number of these content producers would not have a natural home on either Iran’s state broadcasters, or the popular Persian diaspora media channels based in Europe and North America.
Instead, these rising Instagram stars are just ordinary Iranians in search of a little fame and perhaps some financial gain. Just as anywhere else in the world, their videos range from restaurant reviews, to cheesy pop covers, to homemade political satire.
With follower counts ranging from the thousands to hundreds of thousands (and some exceeding the one million mark), this new class of high-powered Instagram influencers has been building broad-based audiences which are too often ignored in discussions about the impact of social media platforms in Iran.
We can say that blogging enabled cultural commentators, students and journalists to gain followers and build their influence, Twitter allowed political activists and commentators to exchange ideas, and that Telegram allowed a semi-professional class of page administrators to start asserting influence over media distribution in Iran. At the same time, we can argue that Instagram has given rise to a class of content producers that is as diverse as Iranian society itself.
What is interesting about this new breed of ‘influencers’ is their self-professed insistence on operating within the Iranian government’s code of conduct and laws. Indeed, many of these Instagram celebrities in their biographies explicitly mentioned that they are operating within the legal framework of the Iranian government.
The growth of Instagram as a platform for Iranians to share photos and videos of their everyday activities, as well as the rise Instagram celebrities, has caused concern among a number of Iranian conservative officials and commentators. On 21 July 2018 Ruhollah Momeni, the head of the Basij-affiliated Cyberspace Literacy Centre, claimed that Instagram has had a “destructive” effect on culture which is “a hundred times greater” than any other online spaces.
A Cracked Lens — State Efforts to Control Instagram
This is not the first time that blocking of Instagram has been discussed in Iran. In December 2013 Instagram was blocked in Iran for a few hours. At the time much of media speculated if Instagram not being available was due to the site being officially filtered in Iran, however, the secretary of CDICC at the time quickly denied this and claimed that the site may have been unavailable for a few hours as the access to one specific Instagram page was being blocked.
For years Iranian authorities toward Instagram was based on the ability to block individual pages that they deemed criminal or unacceptable. The project was labelled ‘smart filtering’, the method relied on the ability to identify individual URL address of accounts on Instagram as they were being accessed by users inside Iran, and to disrupting access to individual pages. Once Instagram introduced the encrypted protocol for all URL address, Iranian authorities were unable to deploy the same methods to block access to individual pages.
Since the death of this smart filtering programme, hardliners, judiciary officials, and security forces have raised concern about online activity of Iranians on Instagram. Even during the protest in December and January, Instagram was blocked with Telegram however the ban was temporary and removed.
Apart from public statements raising concern about the use of Instagram in Iran, security forces have made a number of arrests in recent years in relation to the use of Instagram. For example, In May 2016 eight Instagram models were arrested by Iranian police for ‘un-Islamic’ online activities. Other than arresting celebrities, Iran’s cyber police regularly announce the arrest of Instagram users for promoting gambling or other crimes such as publishing images of other Iranian citizens without their permission.
Flash Forward— What’s Next For Instagram in Iran?
It appears that momentum is building among hardliners and the Iranian judiciary to add Instagram to the long list of banned platforms in Iran. However, there appears to be a different dynamic at play than there was with the bans on Twitter, Facebook or Telegram; whereas the those platforms were filtered on the basis of their use for political mobilisation, Instagram is more frequently criticised for posing a threat to the cultural and moral foundations of the Islamic Republic.
Despite the fact that many high-profile Instagram content producers publish posts that do not overtly push at Iran’s cultural boundaries, there are plenty of users outside of the mainstream that are indeed testing the limits of what the government might find acceptable. Just as Iran’s blogosphere did in its early days, Instagram has created a space for Iranian citizens to create media content that dances over the Islamic Republic’s ‘red lines’ on culture, politics and self-expression.
Two crucial differences between this era of Instagram and the early days of blogging in Iran are apparent in the nature of the content, and its extended reach. By being so immediate, Instagram has created an accessible space that allows anyone to create and consume content. This content may not offer as much space for the exchange of ideas as blogging or other social media platforms, but its reach and cultural influence are unparalleled.
In this sense, a ban on Instagram would represent an attempt by Iranian authorities to try and squeeze years of accumulated social and cultural forces back into Pandora’s Box. Although political dissidents have largely been the target of online censorship up until this point, a ban on Instagram will have a different set of targets in mind: Instagram’s thousands of young influencers, from restaurant critics, to dancers, to wisecracking comics.
An attempt by Iran to wipe out such a significant plane of online existence of thousands of popular online personalities would have consequences — although many big-name influencers have so far made an effort to stay apolitical on the platform, its censorship may well force a rethink on their part. Authorities wouldn’t so much close Pandora’s Box, as they would risk opening a brand new one.
