Iran’s National Cyberspace Council is planning to block Instagram, the last social-media platform freely accessible in the country. This is unlikely to trouble Iranian Instagrammers, who will continue to use the platform through virtual private networks, or VPNs, that route traffic through internet connections abroad. This easy workaround allows Iranians to evade government filters and access banned platforms like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, and use messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram.
It will be instructive to see what President Hassan Rouhani does when the ban, which is backed by Iran’s conservative judiciary, takes effect: he has over 2.2 million Instagram followers. Many senior officials, including cabinet ministers and parliamentarians, openly flout the bans on Twitter and Telegram. Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has over 500,000 followers on his English-language Twitter and 2.3 million on his Persian-language Instagram. The communications firm Burson Cohn & Wolfe ranks Khamenei and Rouhani as among the “most effective” world leaders on Instagram, just behind Donald Trump.
