Hello and a warm welcome.
I am Margarita Grinko from the Institute of Socio-Informatics in Bonn, Germany, and I'm
here to present our paper on behalf of my colleagues, which is called: Nationalizing
the Internet to Break a Protest Movement: Internet Shutdown and Counter-Appropriation
in Iran of late 2019.
As you may remember, before COVID-19 took over the world news, all of Iran was occupied
with protests.
Because gas prices were announced to be raised and due to general economic circumstances,
as one of our study participants suggested, people spontaneously abandoned their cars
on the streets on November 16th 2019 – a reaction which grew into larger protests all
over the country.
The protests were inspired by a photo of a Chinese traffic jam, which you can see in
the background, mistaken for a protest against gas price raise in China.
It spread through Iranian social media like a wildfire after the raise was announced at
midnight.
In the morning, people have woken up to their devices no longer able to connect to the internet.
As participant 13 said: “I was in the middle of a class as I found out that my internet
connection did not work.
After that, I came back home and found our ADSL also was disconnected.”
Presumably to keep people from protesting, the government took an additional measure:
disabling access to the international Internet for up to 2,5 weeks.
What followed was an interesting dynamics of appropriation and counter-appropriation
between the government and its citizens.
It is not a new measure with Iran being one of the states in the world with the highest
rate of censorship, in an attempt of filtering out everything ‘anti-Islamic’ since 2001,
while it also has one of the fastest growing rates of the internet.
The use of social media has shown to be connected to protest, of which the 2009 so-called ‘Twitter
revolution’ (although traditional media sources were much more used at that time,
as Megan Knight suggests), known as the Green Movement, has been a good example.
The government has started filtering and blocking social media partly as a consequence.
Our research is based on the understanding of ‘counter-appropriation’ and ‘attritional
infrastructure’ as introduced by de Castro Leal and others, meaning citizen’s resistance
to a state infrastructure which is meant to monitor, control and restrict information
flow.
In our paper, we look at one aspect of Iran’s attempt to nationalize its internet and centralize
information flow.
For this purpose, we have conducted and analyzed remote qualitative interviews with 19 people
in- and outside of Iran and asked about their experience of the protests, the internet nationalization
and how they dealt with it.
The measure the government imposed was frequently called ‘shutdown’ in the media, but Iranians
still had access to national apps and web-based services.
This is why we call this “nationalization”.
Many people were severely affected by this – emotionally, socially and economically.
Business relying on the Internet was at a halt, families could not speak to each other,
education was inhibited, news could not be received, and protest organization was hindered.
Interview partner 6 said: “The reason I use social media is to find news, information
and express my beliefs.
[…] When the internet was cut off, my connection was completely shut down.
The feeling of frustration, and loneliness overcame me”.
Regarding the protests, participant 1 added: “Information was difficult to access, and
the time and place of the protests were difficult to find out”.
It was therefore not surprising that people were looking for and finding ways to circumvent
these restrictions.
Previous measures I mentioned have made citizens aware of ways like Virtual Private Networks
(VPN), proxy servers, Virtual Private Servers (VPS), and foreign SIM cards.
The government frequently blocked the VPN and proxy server connections, but people found
ways to send new links via social media.
In the background you can see an example of how VPN is set up using a modem connecting
to a network abroad.
Companies and institutions owned by the state on the other hand have maintained access to
foreign websites via VPS.
Some of them shared these resources with others, but they had to be careful to not create too
much traffic which would have raised suspicion.
Those living at the border could obtain SIM cards abroad and connect to the mobile internet.
People exchanged this and other information via free call applications - like Skype, which
offered Iranians 50 free phone calls at that time, text messages, Bluetooth-based apps, flyers
or face to face communication, for example even with taxi drivers.
State-owned apps were also used, but not for sensitive information.
Not all Iranians, however, had the required knowledge or contacts to use these strategies,
which is why most of them remained disconnected until the end.
To affect the protests, the government was additionally surveilling phone communication:
as participant 8 said, “Phone calls were surveilled by government, so nobody dared
to organize a demonstration against them [via telephone]”.
Additionally, officials tried to scare people by sending threatening text messages to those
near protest sites – similar to what has been done during the Ukrainian Maidan protests
in early 2014.
They have also applied violence, arrested people, and the death toll was high.
Planned executions were later not carried out due to international pressure.
In poorer regions the protests continued long after the shutdown with high support by locals,
but eventually they were also forced to give in.
In the words of interview partner 15: “[People] did nothing more for fear of being killed”.
On December 4th, finally all provinces were connected to the internet again.
As said before, this episode has been just one in a long history of the government gaining
control over the Iranian online space, the goal being to establish a National Information
Network, or Shoma in Farsi.
Other countries like China and Russia have been similarly appropriating the internet
for their own goals.
It remains questionable whether such a network would be stable and sustainable enough without
any connection to the international digital infrastructure.
While citizen counter-appropriation has only had limited impact in this case, further on-the-ground
research could be interesting to find out how citizens under other repressive regimes
adapt to the control of information flow, and what the dynamics between appropriation
and counter-appropriation looks like there.
Thank you very much and we are looking forward to discuss with you!