Iran’s internet blackout as media event: Networks, algorithms, and the politics of visibility

February 21, 2026
Bahar Almasi

During Iran’s internet blackout, state violence unfolded unseen with competing propagandists filling the digital void

What began on December 27, 2025, as coordinated strikes in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar rapidly expanded into nationwide demonstrations across more than 30 provinces. As the unrest grew, Iranian authorities imposed a total internet shutdown on January 8 2026, which NetBlocks confirmed, as a near-complete collapse of connectivity, affecting mobile networks, fixed-line services, and international gateways, continued for several days until limited access began returning on January 23.
As limited access returns, videos and testimonies are beginning to reveal a pattern of state violence that the UN Human Rights Council has already described as “unprecedented in its scope and brutality.” According to a TIME Magazine report citing anonymous state officials, the state’s crackdown could have resulted in over 30,000 deaths. Meanwhile, US-based Iranian human rights NGO, HRANA reports at least 41,800, and possibly up to 50,000, arrests across more than 400 cities, with detainees held in overcrowded facilities where they face heightened risks of torture, forced confessions, and summary execution.
A vacuum filled by regime-aligned voices abroad
As in earlier shutdowns in November 2019 and during the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, the blackout also reshaped who could speak for Iranians abroad. With people inside the country cut off, a familiar constellation of regime defenders and state-aligned commentators stepped into the vacuum, influencing how the uprising was interpreted internationally. Reporting has documented protests against figures such as Trita Parsi, founder of NIAC and co-founder of the Quincy Institute, whose public appearances have drawn accusations from demonstrators that they advance narratives sympathetic to Tehran. Similar concerns have surfaced in Canada, where the Iranian Canadian Congress (ICC) has been criticized by diaspora activists for positions they argue align too closely with those of the Islamic Republic.
Revealing evidence of this dynamic surfaced in a recent episode of the Iranian state‑aligned program Dialogue, where two regime‑affiliated intellectuals, Foad Izadi and Bijan Abdolkarimi, discussed building an “Iran lobby” in the United States. Izadi, a frequent state media surrogate who has advocated targeting U.S. troops, and Abdolkarimi, a philosophy professor who has called the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Iran’s “only hope,” debated the structure of such a lobby and explicitly named Trita Parsi and NIAC.
Izadi stressed that it must be an Iran lobby, not an Iranian lobby, a distinction that expands the imagined network beyond nationality and helps explain how seemingly independent journalists or analysts can be treated as potential conduits for state narratives. Citing remarks attributed to former president Hassan Rouhani (“We want an Iranian lobby”), they compared this model to Israeli and Arab lobbying networks. The significance lies in how the Islamic Republic’s own intellectual class conceptualizes diaspora influence and situates NIAC and Parsi within that architecture, revealing how state‑aligned voices abroad help manage narratives when voices inside Iran are silenced.
A systematic playbook of narrative manipulation
The narratives promoted by these actors followed a consistent playbook. At the center of this playbook is the deliberate manufacturing of doubt. Rather than defending the regime’s actions outright, these actors work to destabilize the very possibility of verification: questioning videos, dismissing eyewitnesses, demanding impossible standards of proof, and amplifying minor ambiguities as if they invalidate overwhelming evidence. This strategy mirrors well‑documented disinformation techniques used in other contexts, where the goal is not to persuade audiences of a single narrative but to erode confidence in any account that contradicts the state.
As the examples below illustrate, this engineered uncertainty becomes the foundation on which all other narrative tactics operate. They referred to the protesters as “rioters” and attempted to recast a nationwide political revolt as a narrow economic grievance, but extensive reporting and UN findings show the uprising was driven by decades of repression, not sanctions. They claimed protesters were foreign-manipulated, yet every credible investigation confirms the movement’s domestic roots.
They warned that international support would trigger war or “another Syria,” a fear-based argument contradicted by evidence that the only large-scale violence came from the state itself. They demanded impossible levels of proof for every report of killings while accepting official denials without scrutiny, even though independent forensic analysis, geolocated videos, and hospital records have verified mass casualties.
They, including both Iranian defenders of the regime and non‑Iranians who present themselves as defenders of “Iran,” minimized the crackdown by recasting it as necessary “security operations,” and insisting on police casualty figures that bear no comparison to the thousands of documented deaths and injuries. They tried to muddy the record by claiming videos were “fake,” “old,” or AI-generated and insisting victims’ identities were unverifiable, tactics designed to manufacture doubt even though independent verification and families’ own documentation consistently confirmed both the footage and the names as authentic. When the extent of the massacre became undeniable, the narrative shifted: the killings were suddenly attributed to foreign agents and shadowy armed groups. But countless videos filmed by ordinary Iranians show uniformed state forces attacking unarmed civilians.
By characterizing reporting on state violence as “psychological warfare” or foreign manipulation, they introduced doubt around verified accounts, despite the convergence of independent reporting, citizen footage, and human rights investigations. They argued the regime remained stable and legitimate, even as mass participation in recurrent uprisings, boycotts, polls and elite fractures revealed a profound legitimacy crisis. They blamed sanctions for Iran’s economic collapse, ignoring extensive research showing corruption, IRGC monopolies, and mismanagement as central drivers. They portray those executed or targeted by the regime as violent actors or foreign assets, ISIS militants, MEK members, Kurdish separatists, even alleged Israeli agents, despite UN and NGO documentation of sham trials, forced confessions, and political executions. They claimed information wasn’t being suppressed and argued the internet was shut down only to sever “rioters” from Western instigators, even as journalists were jailed and connectivity was deliberately cut to block reporting. They argued the opposition was weak because Iranians did not want change, overlooking decades of repression, infiltration, and civil-society destruction. They justified the crackdown by claiming protesterswere killing security forces, but independent investigations show many of the so-called “killed Basij members” were actually civilians whose families were coerced into labeling them Basij. Human Rights Watch documented cases where authorities conditioned the release of victims’ bodies on such forced declarations, concealing both victim identities and state violence.
Pro-Pahlavi distortions and the Zionist frame
Meanwhile, foreign-funded and diaspora outlets introduced distortions of their own. During the blackout, some recast the protests through a monarchist, pro-Pahlavi lens, an interpretive shift that mirrors patterns documented by Haaretz, which reported on coordinated influence efforts aimed at elevating Reza Pahlavi as the preferred opposition figure. In this framing, “real Iranians” were often portrayed as Zionist-aligned or openly supportive of Israel’s intervention, a narrative that erased the country’s political diversity and ignored the long history of anti-imperial, anti-authoritarian struggle inside Iran. By presenting the opposition as uniformly pro-Israel, these networks inadvertently reinforced one of the Islamic Republic’s most effective propaganda lines: that the only alternative to the current system is a Western-backed, Zionist project.
A media landscape primed to believe the regime
This dynamic made it easy for the regime to gain credibility among global left-leaning audiences and human-rights activists unfamiliar with Iran’s internal landscape. In the post-Gaza media environment, where distrust of mainstream outlets was high and solidarity with Palestine had become a defining moral axis, the Islamic Republic’s long-standing posture as a defender of Palestine resonated strongly. When pro-Pahlavi voices cast dissenters as Zionist proxies, regime-aligned commentators positioned themselves as the only authentic anti-imperialist actors, even as the state carried out mass killings. For audiences without deep knowledge of Iran, this “regime vs. Zionists” binary appeared coherent, allowing the state’s narrative to circulate largely unchallenged during the blackout, through independent media, that independent activists tended to trust.
The blackout sealed this imbalance. With people inside Iran cut off from the internet, the only voices audible on global platforms were those with uninterrupted access: state broadcasters, official spokespeople, and well-resourced pro-Pahlavi networks. Their narratives dominated not because they reflected reality, but because no in-country uploads or testimonies could surface to counter them.
Meanwhile, most Iranians in the diaspora, many of them immigrants without institutional media access or large platforms, were similarly sidelined. Their perspectives were drowned out by a small number of highly amplified actors whose visibility reflected resources and platform infrastructures rather than representativeness.
The January blackout revealed that political power now operates through control of visibility as much as through force. By severing connectivity, the state decided whose suffering could be seen and whose testimony vanished before reaching the world. In the silence that followed, external actors, regime-aligned or foreign-funded, filled the void, allowing their narratives to harden into “truth” long before survivors could speak. In a landscape shaped by platforms and algorithms, the central question is no longer just what happened in Iran, but who had the power to make their version of events visible.