“Everything stopped suddenly. We are literally out of work now,” Alireza, a 24-year-old university student living in Tehran, told Al-Monitor. He is among many Iranian online entrepreneurs who have suffered major financial losses in recent days due to the authorities’ intensified online filtering, including bans on popular social media platforms such as Telegram and Instagram.
The bans were first imposed Dec. 31, three days after protests first broke out across the country, with Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli saying that some individuals had misused social media networks “to create violence and fear.”