Filtering Has Not Stopped Iranians' Presence in Cyberspace; Over 50% of People Are Active on Social Media

Results from a "cyberspace monitoring system" indicate that despite the filtering of Telegram, Instagram, and Twitter in Iran, tens of millions of Iranian users are active on these three platforms. Research from the "DataK" monitoring system shows that by the end of 1401 (2022), approximately 58 to 61 million Iranians were Telegram users, Instagram had 42 to 46 million Iranian users, and about four million were active on Persian Twitter. The DataK report on Iranian user activity on Instagram states: "Many Iranian users believed that with the filtering of Instagram, this social network would fall out of the ranking of popular social networks in Iran like Facebook; however, DataK's data shows that after the protests, the volume of public content on this platform gradually increased." DataK's findings indicate that last year, from six million Iranian "public" accounts on Instagram, 450 million posts were published, and Iranian users viewed Instagram posts over 25,000 times per second. Additionally, last year, Iranians published approximately 233 tweets per second, with 95% of the total tweets being retweets and only five percent being original tweets. According to the findings of this report, with the onset of the protests in 1401 and the filtering of Instagram, the rate of post publication on this social network clearly decreased; however, this downward trend continued until early Dey 1401 (December 2022) and then returned to previous levels. The DataK monitoring system reports that in 1401, the hashtag "Iran" was the most repeated on Instagram, with hashtags such as Baluchistan, Tehran, Love, and Mahsa Amini also being among the "most repeated" hashtags. Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp, WeChat, TikTok, Telegram, Snapchat, Twitter, and Pinterest are the most popular social networks in the world and have the highest number of users. An interesting point about the 10 most used networks globally is that all of them are filtered in Iran. Ali Beigi: The Islamic Republic has not achieved its intended goals from filtering; only a few have gained financially. A supporter of filtering admits: 200 billion tomans spent on "smart filtering" went up in smoke. Filtering is hell for the people, paradise for VPN sellers; 500 billion tomans monthly profit. An expert: Online marketing under the sword of filtering and internet outages in Iran has died and been revived. The Minister of Communications of the Islamic Republic is unaware of the damage filtering has caused to Iranian users. The year of downfall, the year of escape; a year that Khamenei called "production, knowledge-based, and job-creating." The Minister's repeated attempts to evade responsibility for internet disruptions and filtering; "We are not guilty."