Many Iranians have been forced onto distrusted domestic apps after authorities cut global internet access, disrupting education and business while exposing users to slow speeds, censorship and surveillance fears.
Most affected are businesses reliant on Instagram and other global services, but even users pushed onto domestic platforms described repeated outages, poor functionality and heavy censorship on apps such as Rubika, Bale and Shad.
One citizen said Rubika often fails to send photos and videos for much of the day and alleged the platform checks users’ phone galleries. Another said uploading a single image on Rubika can take an hour.
Citizens also raised concerns that domestic applications could expose their data and devices to state monitoring.
Internet monitoring group NetBlocks said Thursday that 69 days of widespread international internet disruption in Iran had fueled unemployment among workers and redistributed wealth in favor of groups aligned with the government.
Education disrupted
Dozens of students, parents and several teachers said Shad, Iran’s state-run online education platform, does not allow users to properly download photos and videos and does not provide a suitable environment for teaching.
“The children’s classes are online, but the application is designed so only the teacher can speak,” the mother of one student said.
“If a student has a question or does not understand something, they have to wait until five in the afternoon, when student access is reopened. In reality, students are present in the online class, but even if they are absent the teacher does not notice. The entire education process depends solely on parental supervision.”
Some teachers continue to expect students to produce clips and upload them despite low internet speeds, users said.
The problem of accessing information through domestic networks has also affected university students.
A computer student in Tehran said: “Neither the online classes have quality nor can you find anything worth learning in the ‘dictatorship information network.’”
Students said online learning and access to professors’ teaching materials have effectively come to a halt.
Costly barriers
With Instagram blocked by the state, many Iranians have lost a free channel to market goods and services, while domestic apps such as Rubika and Bale charge high advertising fees and impose lengthy, censorship-driven approval processes, citizens said.
Several citizens said Rubika charges business owners about 63 million tomans, roughly $359 at the current open-market exchange rate, for 15 minutes of advertising.
She pointed to what she described as the government’s contradictory treatment of insiders and outsiders in recent months, saying the Islamic Republic used women without compulsory hijab or women with looser dress to promote pro-government nighttime gatherings during and after the war, while rejecting a short advertisement because an elbow was visible for a few seconds.
One female business owner said she was forced to advertise on a domestic app after two months without work so she could sell goods left in her inventory.
“Before approving my channel they took my money, but then rejected my ad with the excuse that my activity on the app was low and my elbow was visible in the video,” she said.
The female business owner added that when she called to ask for the advertising fee back, she was told the money would remain in her wallet until she “fixed the video and channel.”
“So I have to work on an empty channel for several months, bring in goods and invest, just for an empty channel, so maybe they will approve my ad?” she said.
“I spent eight years on Instagram and put time into building my page, but with the internet cutoff I effectively came to a halt. How am I supposed to start again?”
Another user referred to the “thousands of rules and clauses domestic apps have imposed for advertising” and said the platform took “a huge amount of money” before saying it would not advertise an “underwear channel.”
“What am I supposed to do with all this merchandise?” the user said. “Set myself on fire or burn the goods? My business was on Instagram. Restore the internet so I can go back to work.”
A user on X had earlier written that searching for “women’s underwear” on Zarebin, a search engine promoted as Iran’s domestic version of Google, leads to a “no results found” page, while searching for “men’s underwear” produces meaningful results.
“With the national internet, you cannot even buy women’s underwear. It is both ridiculous and tragic,” the user wrote.
Other users said people had turned “out of necessity” and because of the two-month internet cutoff to the Islamic Republic’s “fake” networks such as Bale and Rubika, but said it remained unclear how much access the government could gain through the platforms to citizens’ phones and whether it could monitor or surveil their devices.
Efforts to bypass censorship
Despite the imposed restrictions, users said they continue to find ways to bypass content censorship.
Several citizens said that after access to Telegram was blocked, several channels appeared on local apps such as Soroush Plus, Rubika and Bale offering free or low-cost configurations to bypass filtering.
“They nationalized the internet to gather supporters for the government, but exactly the opposite is happening,” one user said.
Users said this contrasted with content circulated by government-linked figures and channels, which they described as including false claims about the Islamic Republic winning the war with the United States and Israel, false reports of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s death and inaccurate accounts of negotiations.
One user said government-linked content on Rubika portrays the Islamic Republic as defined by “peace, friendship and human rights.”
Despite the government’s efforts to keep the platforms tightly controlled, accounts using the Lion and Sun as profile pictures have appeared. The historic Iranian national emblem is associated by many with the pre-1979 monarchy.
Other accounts have used portraits of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last shah of Iran who was overthrown in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, as profile pictures.
Citizens said such accounts, as well as channels reposting news from the outside world, are blocked and banned after some time.
Still, they said daily resistance continues, with new and larger channels replacing those that are shut down.
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