Can social media save Iran?

Thousands turn out in Melbourne to stand in solidarity with protests that have broken out in Iran following the death of 22-year old Mahsa (also known as Jina or Zhina) Amini at the hands of the country’s brutal dictatorship and its ‘morality’ police. (Photo: Matt Hrkac, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Social media and social protest: transient, fickle, engrossing, yet powerful, and somehow integral.  Waves of protests have flowed their way through our Instagram or Twitter feeds; we research, we care, but then we find something else. While raking up the negatives of this is all too easy, I want to focus on the power of this fickleness.

The protests in Iran epitomise the power in social media. The death of Mahsa Amini, allegedly a brutal beating at the hands of the Iranian police force (the Iranian government denies this – witnesses don’t) sparked huge protests in the country. The government shut down access to the internet, censorship remains stronger than ever, and the morality police maintain a firm presence. But this protest has a key difference to previous attempts: it’s trending. You can argue about how respectful or appropriate it is to plaster a murdered woman’s name around the internet, but it isn’t anything that hasn’t been done before.

Martyrising Mahsa has brought a new light to the situation of women in the country, a new outrage pointed at the government, the so-called morality police and so on. It is one of the first protests in Iran where schoolgirls have been protesting in great numbers, conservative analyst Abdolreza Davari has claimed that 95% of Iranians fear for their future and for the future of their children. These protests are also unique in their more universal nature, when compared to the 2009 protests after the disputed presidential election (where the protesters where overwhelmingly middle class) and the protests triggered by economic hardship in 2019 and 2017, but in that instance, they mainly took place in working-class areas.

There is a clear power in the solidarity of social media, despite its transience. I want to draw a comparison with the Black Lives Matter protests of May 2020 that carried on for most of the summer. Of course, these protests were full of performative activisms and the prioritisation of cutesy Instagram infographics as opposed to constructive activism, but it is impossible to claim that these protests did not ignite some cultural change.

The same can be said of these protests in Iran. The trend of women cutting their hair to protest the hijab rules in Iran, for example, could be criticised for performative activism, after all, what is it actually achieving? But I would counter that performance is not necessarily negative at all times. Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe cut sections of her hair off in a video sent to BBC Persia in which she named Mahsa Amini alongside others. She ends the video with the phrase ‘for my mother, for my daughter, for the fear of solitary confinement, for the women of my country, for freedom’.

For Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who had been imprisoned in Iran since 2016 and had only been released in March of this year, having been falsely accused of spying and attempting to topple the government in Tehran. It is really hard to paint her action in this video as needlessly performative, she is acting in solidarity for her people. When she came to speak at the Cambridge Union, she was asked about how she felt about her Iranian and Persian identity since her horrendous ordeal. She said that her country would always be her country that ‘there is something about the soil that drags you’. Despite the actions of the current state of Iran, many like her in exile have managed to balance the richness of Persian and Iranian culture and history and keep it separate from the current state.

Iran is arguably the only nation state that still exists in the Middle East. In most other neighbouring countries, the borders do not overlap with the anthropological and cultural make-up of the area, for example the region of Kurdistan. Persian identity is very strong, from the language to the food, it is a cultural heritage that many people cling to. As a nation, they have gone to great lengths to preserve this culture from external influences, from the nineteenth century with the British and Russian Empires, to the late 1970s with the revolution against the pro-Western Shah, which turned the country from a reasonably progressive state to the Islamic Republic of today.

But this national identity is multi-faceted, flickered with the faces of religious identities and fervent ideologies. It means that Iran is in conflict with itself; it is impossible to thin the heavy veil of national identity when it is so knotted with different meanings. We cannot analyse Iran from a Western perspective because it refuses to be seen from one. This is a young protest, the new generation, our generation, have realised that their lives can be lived differently.

Despite the theocracy that has been in place for the last 43 years, women in Iran have the highest literacy rate of any Middle Eastern country and one of the highest rates of female STEM graduates. This marks a cultural shift that is currently in progress and these protests could be the dramatic and violent pinnacle. As a young protest, the protesters are using newer modes of communication and presentation, it is logical that they would fall to social media, particularly when the protests could be seen as under reported in traditional media.

This is where the transience of social media can be poignant. Social media is inherently performative, we cannot avoid that – you wouldn’t expect a theatre show to be untheatrical. However, social media can be used as a weapon, and not solely  to bring awareness to the protests but also from a journalistic point of view. In light of the tight restrictions and internet blackouts imposed on the Iranian people in recent months, social media has been integral in spreading information in those brief moments of successful connection to the world.

As such, BBC Persian has painstakingly matched videos of protests on social media with satellite images and street signs to locate each source’s precise location. This work allows an authentic story of the Iranian people’s resistance to be communicated to the world.  Thus, the performance of social media is no longer transparent, nor negative. Yes, something else will probably take over our newsfeeds soon, but for now, the Iranian protests remain.