The running joke on Iranian social media right now is that three green ticks on a domestic messaging app mean that not only does the sender and receiver read the message, but an intelligence officer does too. Iranians heavily relied on Telegram as a form of censorship-free internet not only to chat, but to shop, share parody videos and read the news and official statements from Iranian officials. But ever since parliament member Alaeddin Boroujerdi, the head of parliament’s national security and foreign policy commission, declared on March 31 the decision to ban Telegram and replace it with domestically made apps, Iranians have been waiting for the blow.

The government enacted the ban the following month. “All internet providers in Iran must take steps to block Telegram’s website and app as of April 30,” according to a court order published on Mizan, the judiciary website. Mahsa Alimardani, who leads the digital rights project on Iran at ARTICLE 19, called the banning of Telegram a political move. “This directive came from a new entity within the judiciary, and it seems to be a way to order the Rouhani government against its position to not filter,” Alimardani told Al-Monitor. “That this comes from the hard-line judiciary instead of the multi-agency bodies that members of the Rouhani government are part of is not a surprise.”

At the beginning of April, pragmatist President Hassan Rouhani pushed back on the banning of Telegram during a meeting, saying, “The goal of creating and enhancing Iranian software and messaging apps should not be blocking access [to other apps], but [the goal] should be the elimination of monopolies.”

For over a year, the Iranian government has had a back-and-forth with Telegram’s founder, Pavel Durov, about moving the app’s servers inside Iran. When Durov declined, Iran’s Supreme Cyberspace Council threatened to block the app. It wasn’t until the Iran protests — the nationwide protests that shook the country in December and January — that echelons of the Iranian government shared concern about how the messaging app is being used. Images and footage that were circulated from the protests, and anti-Iranian government Telegram channels fomented violence, prompting the Iranian government to block Telegram and Instagram for several days. On Jan. 16, 170 parliamentarians wrote a letter to the heads of Iran’s three branches of government blaming social media for igniting the protests and demanding Telegram be replaced with domestically made apps.