Platform Surveillance and Resistance in Iran and Russia: The Case of Telegram

Abstract

Telegram messenger, created by an exiled Russian entrepreneur Pavel Durov, brands itself as a non-mainstream and non-Western guarantor of privacy in messaging. This paper offers an in-depth analysis of the challenges faced by the platform in Iran, with 59.5% of the population using its services, and in Russia, where Telegram is popular among the urban dissent. Both governments demanded access to the platform’s encrypted content and, with Durov’s refusal, took measures to ban it. Relying on the concept of surveillant assemblage (Haggerty and Ericson 2000), this paper portrays how authoritarian states disrupt, block, and police platforms that do not comply with their intrusive surveillance. Additionally, we consider the tools and actors that make up internet control assemblages as well as the resistance assemblages that take shape in response to such control.

Do Not Harm in Private Chat Apps: Ethical Issues for Research on and with WhatsApp

“…Chat apps play a key role in contemporary activism, including media activism (see, e.g. Custódio, 2017; F. L. F. Lee and Chan, 2016;Caetano et al, 2018;Treré, 2018;Akbari and Gabdulhakov, 2019). Despite it being frequently considered a flywheel of fake news, especially in countries of the so-called Global South (Burgos, 2019;cf.…”

Digital Activism in Russia: The Evolution and Forms of Online Participation in an Authoritarian State

“…12. For a critical look on the political history of Telegram see Maréchal (2018); for a comparison between political uses of Telegram in Russia and Iran see Akbari and Gabdulhakov (2019).…”

Authoritarian Surveillance: A Corona Test

“…In addition to public trust and acceptance of arbitrary surveillance measures, such operations require a wellestablished ICT infrastructure. Although Iran invests massively in political opposition surveillance through active censorship of the internet, interceptive methods, arrest and intimidation of users, and development of cyber police forces (for a detailed discussion, see Akbari and Gabdulhakov 2019), it lacks the institutional power and the infrastructure to execute mass public surveillance programmes such as those in China and South Korea. The deficient infrastructures become evident in the failure of distance learning during the pandemic.…”