Seven weeks after Iran's conservative-led judiciary banned[1] the secure communications app Telegram[2] inside the country, Iranians are still reeling from the change. Though Telegram has critics in the security community, it has become wildly popular in Iran over the last few years as a way of communicating, sharing photos and documents, and even doing business. The service is streamlined for mobile devices, and its end-to-end encryption[3] stymies the Iranian government's digital surveillance and censorship regime. If the government can't see what you're talking about and doing, it can't block or ban behavior it doesn't like. Telegram's defenses, combined with robust support for Farsi, have attracted 40 million active Iranian users—nearly half the country's population.
On Tuesday, the Center for Human Rights in Iran published a detailed report on the profound impact of blocking Telegram, based on dozens of firsthand accounts from inside the country. Researchers found that the ban has had broad effects, hindering and chilling individual speech, forcing political campaigns to turn to state-sponsored media tools, limiting journalists and activists, curtailing international interactions, and eroding businesses that grew their infrastructure and reach off of Telegram.
The report found that many Iranians continue to use the service through circumvention tools, namely VPNs[4]. Iranians tend to be familiar with and adept at using these options, because they also rely on them to access other blocked online services like Facebook. But the Iranian government's technological capabilities have evolved as well, making it increasingly difficult to maintain usable access to Telegram.
"The only channel of communication that was unfiltered was Telegram. For many Iranians the internet is Telegram and Telegram is the internet," says Omid Memarian, deputy director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran. "It was like a