In the Details of the December 2017 Uprising: Ten Clear Observations on Social Media

Social movements and uprisings are often like volcanoes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and landslides. They occur suddenly and unpredictably, making them difficult to study through controlled methods (like surveys of participants) or engagement (like interviews with protesters in the streets, especially in authoritarian and police states). However, certain events are decisive and key to understanding these occurrences. The most important source for understanding the events of the December 2017 uprising was social media. These networks provide a wealth of information for researchers of social movements. In this article, I present and analyze ten observations from social media (videos and posts) that played a decisive role in understanding the why and how of the December 2017 uprising: 1. The presence of women. In the days of December 2017, three videos shared on social media had the most impact on the audience. In one of the hundreds of videos shared, a woman with a red scarf stands defiantly in front of several intimidating police officers, shouting 'Death to Khamenei.' She utters these words while approaching the officers, not fleeing or distancing herself. In another video, a woman screams and cries out to the officers chasing and beating young people, urging them to let the youth go and not to attack them. In a third video, a mother whose child has been imprisoned cries out that her child has been taken to a dungeon. Other videos show officers saying they should fight against foreign attackers rather than the citizens, or young people helping each other under gunfire, but those three videos vividly display the suffering of Iranian women in 1396 (2017) under a religious regime and their courage more than ever. 2. Urban suppression readiness. Videos shared on social media show that in central Tehran, the number of forces was even greater than those moving on the sidewalks, and special suppression forces were on high alert throughout the city. Some metro stations were quickly closed. It was clear that the government was better prepared and more coordinated for urban suppression than in 1388 (2009) and was rapidly mobilizing its forces. This indicates that the coercive forces anticipated these protests and were prepared to confront them in larger urban areas (not small ones). In the first week of protests, the government concentrated its forces in Tehran. Consequently, in smaller towns, protesters had more opportunities to protest and attack religious centers and the offices of Friday prayer leaders. Some cities, like Izeh, were completely occupied by protesters for hours, and in some cities, police stations were quickly ordered to fire. Videos shared on social media show that in some cities, thugs were brought to the scene with knives to display power. The dispute that arose among government officials after the protests peaked and Instagram and Telegram were filtered was not about citizens' rights. The dispute was about how much control the government has over citizens' communications and the costs and benefits of control methods in social media. The government and some security forces see benefits in these networks for political and social control, but the religious bureaucracy and judiciary, along with other security forces, perceive the risks as high. The outlook of this dispute is the limitation of social networks. 3. Protest in a totalitarian system. Many social media users labeled this movement as a revolution against inflation or a bread and job revolution. This simplistic and reductionist judgment is misguided. In the December 2017 uprising, the separation of politics and economics, which has been made in all analyses produced in government institutions, is a futile and misleading distinction. In Iran, there is no free market economy to separate livelihood and politics. In Iran, every protest is political because the government is present in all areas. When the commanders of the IRGC own restaurants and pastry shops, protests against them also become political. A government that controls most of the country's wealth and income, plunders, wastes, and extravagantly spends cannot naturally create a gap between livelihood and political demands. In a capitalist and free market system, we attribute the price of eggs to supply and demand or unpaid wages to factory owners. In Iran, everything is connected to the government, and protests are directly aimed at it. If the government wants to rid itself of the multitude of protests, it must make people's affairs dependent on the people themselves and invest national resources for the future of citizens. 4. Reformists as part of the suppression propaganda apparatus. The language of a significant and powerful portion of reformists on Twitter and Telegram was the language of suppression: chaos, turmoil, exploitation, instigation, foreign hands, conspiracy, and division (the most important being the statement from the Combatant Clergy Association), ignoring totalitarianism, authoritarianism, and the suppression system. These are insults to the protesters. After the December 2017 uprising and the positions of reformists, it has become entirely official that reformists have become part of the propaganda apparatus of the suppression organization. Even some who signed the reformists' 16-person letter urging against conspiracy thinking relied on it in their individual positions (like Abbas Abdi). There is sufficient evidence for this positioning of reformists within the propaganda framework of the suppression organization. They were not concerned with humanity and ethics during the protests: they were busy taking revenge on the opposing faction and getting closer to the suppression apparatus. Instead of siding with the weak and voiceless, they stood with power and compared the protesters' movement to the armed actions of the Mojahedin-e Khalq in the 1980s (at least Abdi and Alavi Tabar). Reformists in 1396 (2017) are part of the core of power; those who are not are completely marginalized. Instead of telling the government that they are monitoring its behavior, reformists defend government actions. In a world where Twitter exists, after Jafari officially announced the suppression of protests, Tajzadeh and Moein were just starting to tweet. They implicitly say that we must understand Rouhani's conditions but do not say we must understand the conditions of low-income groups. Reformists had well-heeded Khamenei's words that one cannot benefit from the system's interests and also be in opposition. Therefore, they abandoned the role of opposition and became state radio and television. This issue has not gone unanswered by the opposing faction to the extent that Ezzatollah Zarghami has defended dissenting views. 5. The absence of soft war officers. After the Green Movement in 1388 (2009), the government's emphasis was that to counter the reflection of protests on websites and social media, Basijis and government supporters must have a powerful presence in the online space defending the government and Islamism. The noticeable absence of these 'soft war officers' during the 2017 protests in social media and the delegation of government propaganda to state television and the Islamic Propaganda Organization (to organize spontaneous rallies) indicates that these soft war officers have been preoccupied with hacking and extortion in the online space instead of working in public opinion persuasion and mind washing. 6. Insults and accusations. The protesters in the Green Movement were called debris and microbes (by Ahmadinejad and Khamenei) on state radio and television, and in the December 2017 uprising, they were referred to as vultures (Mohammad Reza Jalai-Pour) and rootless (Ata Mohajerani) on social media, and worse, as Daesh-like (Hossein Shariatmadari) and scarecrows (the prayer leader of January 5, 2018). In the Green Movement, protesters were accused of burning the Quran, and in the December 2017 uprising, they were accused of burning the flag of Iran. The flag that was burned just once and filmed on social media was not the flag of Iran; it was the flag of the Islamic Republic filled with religious symbols. Supporters of the Islamic Republic do not want to see the difference between Iran as a nation-state and the Islamic Republic as a political regime. Iran existed until 1357 (1979) without a flag filled with religious symbols. Many social media users labeled this movement as a revolution against inflation or a bread and job revolution. This simplistic and reductionist judgment is misguided. In the December 2017 uprising, the separation of politics and economics, which has been made in all analyses produced in government institutions, is a futile and misleading distinction. In Iran, there is no free market economy to separate livelihood and politics. In Iran, every protest is political because the government is present in all areas. When the commanders of the IRGC own restaurants and pastry shops, protests against them also become political. A government that controls most of the country's wealth and income, plunders, wastes, and extravagantly spends cannot naturally create a gap between livelihood and political demands. 7. 'Death to Khamenei' by children. Three videos on social media show groups of 20 to 30 children chanting 'Death to Khamenei.' All three are clearly taken in small towns. These show that the Islamic Republic is not in a downward spiral but has already been judged in the minds of Iranian children in less populated areas. These children, unlike urban children whose parents teach them duality and dual behavior at home and school from childhood, express what is in their hearts and souls with the simplicity of rural and remote areas. We witnessed such events in the final months of the Pahlavi regime. The outlook is not that this government will definitely fall in a month or two, but many signs of this fall are visible in Iran. 8. A weakness that strengthens. Based on repeated observations of protest videos on social media, between 50,000 to 500,000 people (according to estimates of 500 to 5,000 people in 100 cities) came to the streets in Iran, rejecting religious despotism, pervasive corruption, and structural issues, religious bureaucracy, and totalitarianism, while political and civil activists, intellectuals, writers, and sports and artistic figures not only ignored it but also sided with the government. Continuationists say they do not know what the protesters want, but their demands are clear. On social media, many labeled the protesters as illiterate and uninformed. The figures who supported these voiceless individuals from within were very few. The strength of this group is that they have not been exposed to the nonsense and anti-Western, anti-American, anti-Israeli, and anti-liberal rhetoric of Al Ahmad, Shariati, Naraghi, Shayegan, Soroush, Bazargan, and others. A generation exposed to a plethora of nonsense ignores all of it. Of course, the weakness of this group causes shame and embarrassment for all those who have been and are around the circles of government rents. 9. The endless power of foreign powers. Islamic Republic officials attributed the management of the December 2017 protests to the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Salafists, and even the Kurdistan region (during this period, Britain and France were put on leave; the Russians were removed from the list of conspirators after suppressing leftist opponents since 1361). Mentioning the Kurdistan region is one of the highlights of this period. These attributions (though futile and unsubstantiated), which are sometimes based on the activities of individuals in the Kurdistan region or Saudi Arabia on social media in reporting this event, if true, would be an admission of the extreme weakness of the country's security institutions. Military and security officials should resign solely because of this claim, as they have not fulfilled their duties. On the other hand, congratulations should be extended to Saudi Arabia and the Kurdistan region (or further afield, the United States and Israel) for being able to mobilize tens to hundreds of thousands in Iran against the government via Twitter, Telegram, and Instagram, causing the government to deploy hundreds of thousands of police, Basij, and IRGC forces against them. 10. How to learn from the uprising. All Telegram channels and the websites of state and semi-state newspapers have been singing 'learning from the riots' since the second day of protests. They say the government should address the marginalized classes, but they do not say how public resources are spent. Regarding the lessons the government should learn from the protests, one of the government's propagandists writes: 'We assessed the scale of pure anti-revolutionary movements in the cities. And of course, we recognized our weakness in dealing with riots in small towns.' (A, January 5, 2018) The above phrase clearly shows that in seemingly news and semi-state channels and websites, it is the security forces that write the content, and there is fundamentally no media or analysis in the Islamic Republic; there are propaganda devices and security analyses. In these learnings, collusion at the top is suggested by political activists from both sides to facilitate greater political control. Look at the dialogue between Alireza Alavi Tabar and Salimi Namin with Etemad Online. Neither mentions the authoritarian and totalitarian foundations of the regime. The eternal nature of the regime is assumed for them, and they speak about increasing the regime's power in the face of crises. This means a reconciliation of factions to confront upcoming protests: 'If this dialogue begins, many problems will be solved. I do not believe we will necessarily reach an agreement in these discussions. We must begin the dialogue assuming that differences will remain, and then on the issue of maintaining different identities on topics where there is consensus...