An Internet Blackout Hides A Regime's Excesses

Summary

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Podcast Summary: An Internet Blackout Hides A Regime's Excesses

Podcast: On the Media (WNYC Studios)
Date: February 11, 2026
Host: Brooke Gladstone
Guest: Mahsa Ali Mardani (Associate Director, Technology Threats and Opportunities, Witness)

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Overview

This episode examines the role of Internet connectivity, media blackout, and disinformation in Iran amid recent protests. Host Brooke Gladstone speaks with Mahsa Ali Mardani, an expert in digital rights and documentation, about how Iranian authorities leverage Internet shutdowns and manipulation of information as a tool of repression. The conversation explores the evolution of censorship tactics, citizen journalism, external interventions like Starlink, and the long-term implications of lost collective memory in the digital age.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Immediate Context: Protest and Blackout

• Violent anti-government protests erupted in Tehran amid high inflation and economic crisis at the end of 2025 ([00:12]).
• By January 8, 2026, the Iranian government initiated the country's longest national Internet blackout to date to stifle organization and international witness ([00:35]).
• The blackout lasted nearly three weeks, stalling the flow of protest documentation and fostering a fog of disinformation ([00:59], [01:25]).

Notable Quote:
“The Internet shutdowns is just one layer of what they do to ensure that the power to witness, the power to document, is extremely difficult.”
— Mahsa Ali Mardani [01:25]

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2. Historical Roots of Censorship and Blackouts

• Iran’s first significant attempt at a global shutdown occurred in 2009, reacting to viral protest images, showing the regime’s early recognition of visual documentation as a threat ([01:38]-[01:57]).
• The infamous 2009 viral image of Neda Aga Sultan’s death became emblematic of oppression ([02:28]).
• By 2019, government tactics had escalated, deploying week-long Internet blackouts and intensified violence. Data on deaths is imprecise due to deliberate information suppression ([02:55]-[03:26]).

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3. Sources of Truth: Citizen Documentation Amid Censorship

• Reliable on-the-ground journalism and fact-finding are nearly impossible; most accurate information comes from:
  • Anonymous citizen-run social media accounts, e.g., Vahid Online on Twitter ([03:43]).
  • Fact-checking organizations (e.g., BBC Verify, Harana) independently verify and document available footage and casualties ([03:43]-[04:53]).
• Registered deaths vary widely: Medical sources report up to 30,000; human rights orgs like Harana confirm around 6,500 with 12,000 cases still under review ([04:53]).
• Trauma and fear drive many families to silence, making documentation more difficult ([05:24]).

Notable Quote:
“Through my own personal networks, I’ve heard of families that are so traumatized and so frightened by the process of just retrieving their loved ones bodies that they refuse to talk to anyone.”
— Mahsa Ali Mardani [05:24]

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4. Circumventing Blackouts: Starlink’s Impact

• Iranians use various strategies to access the Internet during shutdowns; recently Starlink has provided a rare lifeline ([05:52]).
• Starlink was crucial during the blackout for allowing some protest documentation to reach the outside world ([06:18]).

Notable Quote:
“During the weeks of the blackout in Iran, Starlink was the only way that documentation was coming out. Without that window, it would have just been what the regime was saying…”
— Mahsa Ali Mardani [06:18]

• State-friendly media like Al Jazeera heavily reinforced regime narratives during the blackout, further highlighting the value of independent citizen access ([07:20]).

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5. Disinformation and the “Liar’s Dividend”

• The “Liar’s Dividend”: The existence and awareness of deepfakes and AI manipulation allows regimes to sow doubt on any documentation, even authentic evidence ([08:02]-[08:22]).
• Case study: The “Tankman” video — AI-edited protest footage was weaponized by the regime to dismiss genuine documentation as conspiratorial fakes ([09:29]-[10:17]).
• Regime-linked manipulation and “false flag” social media accounts further muddy the waters, seeding doubt about protest authenticity ([10:49]-[12:00]).

Notable Quotes:
“Just the notion that people are aware or worried about AI or deep fakes creates this ability to cast doubt and be able to be a benefit to someone who wants to deny the truth.”
— Mahsa Ali Mardani [08:22]

“Don’t screw with an original piece, because then the government could say, look, look, this has clearly been doctored.”
— Brooke Gladstone [09:58]

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6. Systemic Internet Control: The "Barracks Internet"

• The Iranian regime is formalizing a system to offer unrestricted Internet only to elites, pushing most citizens onto a censored intranet (“Barracks Internet”) ([12:38]).
• Tiered access has existed for years; government officials continue using global platforms like Twitter while denying access to ordinary Iranians ([13:06]-[13:31]).
• Implementation involves ISP-level cooperation and political compliance, exemplified by the firing of non-compliant network executives ([13:38]).

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7. Reimagining Digital Infrastructure and Human Rights

• Even stable democracies must confront the reality that the Internet is embedded in government infrastructure, making full control technically possible ([14:12]-[14:46]).
• Satellite Internet and direct-to-cell connectivity may provide future avenues for resistance, but equitable and rights-based mechanisms are needed ([14:46]-[16:08]).

Notable Quote:
“Not just relying on one company, but creating these human rights mechanisms where you have concrete commitments by the satellite operators to turn these services on in these very high-stakes contexts is really essential.”
— Mahsa Ali Mardani [15:41]

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8. Collective Memory and the Power of Witnessing

• Reference to the 1988 mass executions: A “collective forgetfulness” within Iran, enabled by lack of documentation and suppression ([16:08]-[16:30]).
• The Internet’s unique capacity to generate lasting, global collective memory threatens authoritarian regimes ([17:16]).

Notable Quote:
“That is one of the things that speaks to the power of the Internet, the way that we can document and witness atrocities. It is a massive threat to regimes like the Islamic Republic because it is this collective memory…”
— Mahsa Ali Mardani [17:16]

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Memorable Moments & Quotes

• On trauma’s cost: “Families that are so traumatized and so frightened... refuse to talk to anyone. They’re so scared to put their children’s names on any sort of documentation.” ([05:24])
• On the ‘liar’s dividend’: “Just the notion that people are aware or worried about AI or deep fakes creates this ability to cast doubt…” ([08:22])
• On Starlink’s necessity: “Starlink was the only way that documentation was coming out. Without that window, it would have just been what the regime was saying…” ([06:18])
• On collective memory: “That is one of the things that speaks to the power of the Internet, the way that we can document and witness atrocities.” ([17:16])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:35 — Iran's Internet blackout and its objectives
• 01:25 — How shutdowns impede documentation and witnessing
• 02:28 — The viral image of Neda Aga Sultan
• 03:43 — Where trustworthy information comes from
• 05:52 — The Internet “cat-and-mouse” and Starlink’s utility
• 08:02 — The regime’s use of the “liar’s dividend”
• 09:29 — The “Tankman” case and dangers of AI artifacts
• 12:38 — “Barracks Internet” and tiered access system
• 14:46 — How to reimagine digital infrastructure to resist control
• 16:08 — The fading of collective memory and documentation’s importance

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Conclusion

This episode offers a nuanced, detailed portrait of how Iran’s government leverages Internet blackouts and disinformation to hide mass repression, and how digital tools—while imperfect—are lifelines for truth and collective memory. Mardani’s insights underscore both the peril and promise of Internet technologies in repressive regimes, and stress the global imperative to create resilient channels for documentation and witnessing in the digital age.

Transcript

[A]

This is on the media's midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. At the end of November, familiar scenes of protest in Tehran were being documented and shared across the world.

[B]

Protesters have taken to the streets of Iran's capital city as the country faces some of its worst economic pressures in years. Crowds cheering around this bonfire, dancing around.

[A]

The flames, chanting down with the dictator.

[B]

Blasting the regime over Iran's failing economy and soaring inflation.

[A]

But on January 8, the images stopped coming.

[B]

Iran's Internet was cut off late on Thursday, apparently an attempt by the authorities to prevent protesters from organizing and also stopped them posting videos online for the outside world to see.

[A]

Activists say more than 6,000 people are now dead and 11,000 injured in the Iranian protests.

[B]

I would say everyone I've spoken to in the diaspora knows someone at least one degree away from them who has been murdered.

[A]

Mahsa Ali Mardani is the associate director of the Technology Threats and Opportunities program at Witness, where she works on distinguishing visual truths in the AI age. She says that the Internet has started flickering back on after a nearly three week national blackout, the longest the country has ever seen. And yet a thick fog of disinformation still covers Iran.

[B]

It's really unfathomable. The Internet shutdowns is just one layer of what they do to ensure that the power to witness, the power to document, is extremely difficult.

[A]

You've noted that one of Iran's first global shutdowns happened in 2009. It was brief, but the government was spooked by an image that went viral which let them know that this was a force that they were going to have to control. Right.

[B]

In 2009, we had the fraudulent election. There was an uprising. Millions of people went out onto the streets to protest. We saw security forces turn weapons onto protesters. And the viral video of the young Neda Aga Sultan became something that captivated audiences all around the world. And I think it was one of these very first instances where we saw protest documentation go viral.

[A]

This young woman's face dead became an image of oppression. All over the world. There was a protest roughly every two years. 2017 had censorship, but it was really 2019 when things took on a whole new level. That was the women, life and freedom protests.

[B]

By 2019, we did see them mobilize a Internet shutdown for almost a week across the whole country. It's suspected they've killed 1500 protesters. The exact number has been hard to arrive at because that was the feature of the crackdown. It was to shut down the Internet, it was to coerce Families into silence. But that was one of the first times we saw something horrific on that scale.

[A]

You've said that Iranians have no real access to professional on the ground documentation and fact finding. You know, journalists basically give me a quick view of where the good information is coming from as we speak.

[B]

We have some really incredible social media accounts that have been doing very quiet work of citizen documentation. There's one Twitter account called Vahid Online. It's an anonymous account and for years it's been sharing protest footage. It's believed to be one person. And this one person does say like, I'm not able to do fact checking. I can't verify everything. I'm just sharing what I have. He puts it out. And I know there's different fact checking efforts like BBC Verify exists various different fact checking organizations and they take this content from his account and other social media and document it. You have the professional human rights documentation efforts we have. Harana has been doing some of the most well known documentation of the death tolls, for example. There's different accounts of this. So there's been a couple of reports from the Times of London and from the Guardian where they have worked with medical workers and even have had an account from someone anonymous within the Ministry of Health from the regime say that from what they've been able to document just from the hospitals, there have been 30,000 dead. And then of course you have the firsthand documentation efforts that story by story verify the accounts and the total protesters killed that Harana has been able to verify firsthand is 6476. And they still have about 12,000 cases under review. In terms of the politics of disinformation the regime uses, they're like, well, if you add this up, they don't even reach the 30,000. So all of these figures are just lies, which, you know, Harana doesn't have access to every single case. And they will admit that they might never have access to every single case. Even through my own personal networks, I've heard of families that are so traumatized and so frightened by the process of just retrieving their loved ones bodies that they refuse to talk to anyone. They're so scared to put their children's names on any sort of documentation.

[A]

You say that there's an effort by Iranians to try and use the Internet as a cat and mouse game. Every few years you say the government introduces a new level of Internet censorship. So then Iranians try different ways to get online. Lately it seems like Elon Musk's Starlink has become increasingly widespread. Is that useful?

[B]

Whenever I try to talk about this, I reference a really great essay from a Sudanese activist and writer. Her essay was entitled the Sudanese People don't have the Luxury to hate Elon Musk. Because during the Sudanese civil war, Starlink was also a lifeline to many civilians during that crisis. During the weeks of the blackout in Iran, Starlink was the only way that documentation was coming out. Without that window, it would have just been what the regime was saying for the first few days as the citizen non governmental information was struggling to trickle out, they were trying to dominate narratives. I mean, Al Jazeera has a correspondent based in Tehran that looks like they likely cooperate with the state. And they were just documenting how many security forces were dying and how these events were dangerous rioters who were terrorists.

[A]

This is how Al Jazeera was reporting it.

[B]

It's actually been something that I've been following how the way Al Jazeera has reported on protests in Iran has significantly changed from 2022 till now. I remember following during the Woman Life freedom protests in 2022. Not that they were always perfect, but it was never like this. I remember in the first few days of the blackout, Al Jazeera was one of the first outlet a article smearing Harana and I could see significant disinformation. And this was not the case during 2022.

[A]

And now the government has another tool in its online arsenal. A deadly game is afoot which seeks to leverage what you call the Liar's Dividend. Explain what it is and how it's relevant by describing a case.

[B]

What the Liar's Dividend essentially says is that just the notion that people are aware or worried about AI or deep fakes creates this ability to cast doubt and be able to be a benefit to someone who wants to deny the truth. This has existed before AI, but of course, in the age of AI, it's much easier to cast doubt. The most famous was the Tankman case. So this was on December 28th. Someone was able to capture footage of a brave protester in Tehran confronting security forces with weapons on motorcycles and sitting in front of them. This was captured and someone took a screenshot of it and it went viral. And many people said it reminded them of the symbolic image of the tank man from Tiananmen Square.

[A]

In that was the protester basically staring down a tank back in 1989 in China. Then what happened?

[B]

This video was caught from a very tall building nearby and it was zoomed in and of course the quality was quite low. And so A screen grab of that video ends up being shared. And at some point in the information pipeline, someone decides to use a editing tool that uses generative AI. And some AI artifacts are present, like two of the security forces have merged into one.

[A]

So someone was trying to tidy up the photograph in so doing, left these fingerprints of AI on it. I think the lesson here is don't screw with an original piece, because then the government could say, look, look, this has clearly been doctored.

[B]

Of course, it didn't help that the Persian account of the Israeli state, which often likes to show that they're on the side of the people of Iran, also picked up this AI edited photo and shared it. And then the narrative became, well, this is all just a Israeli conspiracy, which is a very dangerous narrative because we're seeing people, the protesters who are in jail, forced to confess they work for Israel, when they are just authentic protesters seeking liberation.

[A]

Then on December 30, there was an account claiming affiliation with the Mujahideen EQ, an exiled opposition group known as MEK, which the US once designated as a terrorist organization. There was a video posted in which pro Pahlavi, that was the name of the last Shah. So pro monarchy chants seemed to be dubbed over protest footage. And this was another case of what's real, what's fake, and who benefits.

[B]

I looked into some of the accusations, and for example, I saw this one account claiming to be mek, and it was the first account to post this video of an allegedly manipulated audio over protests to show the real protest footage without the manipulation. So they created the manipulation and they created the accusation, and very quickly. Typically, this content was picked up by pro regime accounts.

[A]

Why did they create the manipulation? What was going on there? I can't figure it out.

[B]

One of the options that some people inside of Iran have turned to is the former Crown Prince. And of course, it was documented a lot of people were chanting for his return. The regime wanted to create this narrative that this was all fake. And they have this tactic where they have different social media accounts pretending to take on different identities of people in the diaspora. So that account was pretending to be the mek. They've been documented to do this. They place this seed of doubt into the information space. Then people were like, oh, okay, well, this is probably fake, when indeed it wasn't.

[A]

There's a group called Filter Watch that monitors Iranian Internet censorship from the US and it seems that the Iranian government is currently constructing a permanent system to grant full Internet access only to certain elites, while corralling most of the roughly 90 million citizens into an intranet. This is called the barracks Internet.

[B]

We have already seen tiered access since systems of censorship were formalized across the Iranian Internet in the early 2000s and 2010s. We've seen government institutions have uncensored access to the Internet. While they declare that people shouldn't be accessing Twitter, they've had all the government officials on Twitter. This unequal access has always been part of the system.

[A]

Who gets special access to an open Internet there? How is that pulled off?

[B]

The Internet service providers have a different infrastructure. It's not a simple switch when it comes to disconnecting people. So you have to have ISPs cooperate and shut down. When the shutdown happened on January 8, there's a famous story. One of the big ISPs in Iran, the CEO of the ISP, he took two hours longer than everyone else to implement the shutdown across the network he owned. And they fired him and they replaced him with someone who was much more subservient to the orders from the top.

[A]

You've studied Internet censorship for years and have concluded that even in the stablest of democracies, the Internet is still embedded in a government infrastructure that enables governments to take partial or full control. This needs to be broken, reconstructed. One could say the same thing about capitalism in America today. But how do you reimagine it? What are the mechanisms whereby you could rebuild it in a way that would resist government control?

[B]

I cannot think of any other point in history where we have had deaths at the rate that the Islamic Republic committed during those two days. This case in Iran should be a case study of how do we reimagine and how do we create these mechanisms. And inspired by the case of Starlink about the opportunities it has presented. And of course, at the end of the day, Starlink is a private company. Obviously not everyone can have a Starlink receiver. It's quite expensive. But this technology is moving forward where direct to cell satellite Internet can be possible. I mean, it is possible with any smartphone made from 2020 onwards. And it will soon have many more possibilities with newer models of phones that are able to connect much more easily to some of these direct to cell satellites that are in space. And so not just relying on one company, but creating these human rights mechanisms where you have concrete commitments by the satellite operators to turn these services on in these very high stakes contexts is really essential. And it's something. Since this shutdown happened, I have been actively talking about it and pursuing with a coalition of different human rights organizations.

[A]

In an interview with the Verge, you brought up the 1988 fatwa, when the government killed between 2,800 and 5,000 political prisoners. You say there's very little collective memory of that event within Iran. How come?

[B]

As someone who grew up mostly outside of Iran, an Iranian family that left Iran at that time, I grew up hearing the stories of the mass graves. I had so much access to family accounts and individual accounts of those massacres. Whereas the son of someone who was in prison and somehow managed to survive but his friends were massacred didn't grow up with that collective memory. They only took the time to learn of this event that was so formative to their father's life when they left Iran. Because of course, it wasn't documented, it wasn't shared within the media. That collective memory didn't necessarily hold. That is one of the things that speaks to the power of the Internet, the way that we can document and witness atrocities. It is a massive threat to regimes like the Islamic Republic because it is this collective memory, it is the power of witnessing that allows these movements to go on and I am sure will eventually bring the end of this regime. It's just very hard to understand how a society like this will not just collapse on itself.

[A]

Mahsa, thank you very much.

[B]

Thanks so much for having me.

[A]

Mahsa Ali Mardani is the Associate Director of Technology Threats and Opportunities Program at Witness. She's been researching digital rights in Iran since 2012. Thanks for checking out the midweek podcast the Big show host on Friday. See you then.

[C]

This is Ira Flato, host of Science Friday. For over 30 years, the science Friday team has been reporting high quality science and technology news, making science fun for curious people by covering everything from the outer reaches of space to the rapidly changing world of AI to to the tiniest microbes in our bodies. Audiences trust our show because they know we're driven by a mission to inform and serve listeners first and foremost with important news they won't get anywhere else. And our sponsors benefit from that halo effect. For more information on becoming a sponsor, visit sponsorship.wnyc.org.