Five-minute read
On a normal day, the “About this account” box on X (formerly Twitter) looks like UI filler—one more panel you swipe past on your way to the quote-tweets. In Persian-language X, that tiny box has turned into a crime scene.
Following a recent update on X, a weird pattern has emerged. Influencers loudly branding themselves as exiled monarchists—posting in perfect diaspora tone from “Toronto,” “London,” or “Los Angeles”—open their mouths, and the metadata quietly says: Tehran, Iran Android app. The location label moves; the underlying access path doesn’t.
It’s a small glitch in the performance, but a huge tell. In a country where X is officially banned, where a working VPN is a luxury, and where a big chunk of the population is struggling just to pay for food, a class of users is somehow living online in high definition, all day, every day.
Welcome to Iran’s white-SIM internet—and to a social-media ecosystem that Tehran is curating not just for its own citizens, but for you: the think tanks, desks, and feeds that watch Persian X to understand “what Iranians really want.”
A Banned Platform That Won’t Stay Quiet
Iran blocked X after the 2009 protests. Formally, it’s off-limits. In practice, there are three ways in:
- VPN roulette – unstable, slow, and increasingly expensive.
- Enterprise-grade workarounds – available to a narrow urban and professional elite.
- Being trusted by the state – the white-SIM route.
Layer on top of that an economic reality Western readers often miss: a large share of Iranians now live at or near the poverty line; estimates from official and semi-official sources run as high as 40–60 percent in relative or absolute poverty. In that environment, constant VPN use and high-bandwidth political posting are not hobbies of the average teacher or factory worker. They’re privileges.
So, when you scroll Persian X, you are not looking at “Iran.” You’re looking at:
- a thin slice of the urban middle and upper classes,
- regime-connected figures and their families,
- professional cyber operators,
- plus the diaspora.
That doesn’t make the platform useless. It makes it structured—and very attractive to a regime that understands perfectly well how much Western analysis now depends on social-media signals.
Iran’s Cyber Army: A Force of Disinformation for a Cursed Causehttps://t.co/S3LusEN4HB
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) April 26, 2023
Class-Based Connectivity as Policy
Inside Iran, people have invented terms for this hierarchy:
internet sefid (white internet) and internet tabaqati (class-based internet).
Investigations have documented what that means in practice: certain users—politicians, state-aligned journalists, favored influencers—get SIM cards and connections that sit on a whitelist. Filters are relaxed. Throttling disappears. Banned platforms behave as if they were never banned.
The controversy blew up when X’s new transparency tools exposed that some of these public figures, who had long claimed to be “just like everyone else” using VPNs, were in fact connecting directly through the regime’s own app stores and infrastructure. They weren’t fighting censorship. They had a different internet.
The Monarchist Mirage
This brings us back to the sudden digital “revival” of the monarchy.
Look only at follower counts and retweet storms, and you might conclude that Reza Pahlavi—the exiled son of the Shah—is enjoying a massive, organic comeback among Iranians. Look at how many accounts with flags and royal avatars are yelling in English and Farsi. Look at all the polls they circulate.
Now zoom in.
A closer look at X’s “About this account” panel reveals a different kind of anomaly. Some of the loudest pro-monarchist profiles, posting aggressive anti-regime content day after day, are clearly connecting via the Iran Android app. In a country where X is banned and where multiple cyber-police units (including FATA) routinely trace, arrest, and even physically eliminate genuine dissident users across platforms, the fact that these accounts remain verified, active, and untouched is itself a data point. Their safety is part of the story.
At the same time, a joint investigation by Haaretz and the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto documented an Israeli-backed influence operation that, during the twelve-day Iran–Israel war, deployed a network of fake and AI-generated accounts on X and other platforms to promote Reza Pahlavi and the restoration of the monarchy as a preferred alternative to the clerical dictatorship.
Put those two facts next to each other and something interesting appears: the loudest monarchist content in your feed is a hybrid product—part diaspora, part in-country accounts with privileged access, part foreign amplification.
For Tehran, a weak rival is the best rival. Keeping a noisy, digitally inflated monarchy brand alive is not a bug; it’s a feature.
Ruhollah Mo'men Nasab, parliamentary special advisor on the so-called "internet users projection bill" and former commander of the cyber army reveals how #Tehran has been using @Twitter for #propaganda.
#Iran #InternetFreedom pic.twitter.com/kHzjtlEFvR— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) March 29, 2022
Meanwhile, Outside the Feed
The online bravado contrasts sharply with what happens to people who step out of line offline.
Take Roya Zakeri, a young woman from Tabriz. A short clip of her shouting against Ali Khamenei made its way to social media. Not long after, she was arrested, beaten, and forcibly transferred to a psychiatric facility. Her whereabouts are unknown as of now.
Or Zahra Shahbaz Tabari, a 67-year-old engineer. Security forces raided her home looking for evidence of terrorism. They found, among other things, a cloth banner reading “Woman, Resistance, Freedom.” After a hearing reportedly lasting around ten minutes, she was sentenced to death.
This is the price of opposition the regime actually fears.
Now compare it to the total impunity of large accounts—some with hundreds of thousands of followers—posting day and night from inside Iran, under alias names or glamorous stock photos, attacking other opposition movements far more than they attack the state.
If revolutions were decided by ratio counts, these people would already be in charge. They’re not. And the regime seems extremely relaxed about their existence.
Cyber Contractors and the Business of Narrative
Tehran doesn’t just let this happen; it invests in it.
Semi-official outfits like the Mesaf institute, associated with propagandist Ali Akbar Raefi-Pour, are described in Iranian and exile reporting as command centers for organized “cyber battalions.” Their job is not just to chant slogans online. They:
- launch coordinated pile-ons against selected targets,
- run smear campaigns against critics and rival conservatives,
- and flood debates with talking points that subtly steer blame away from core power structures.
On top of these contractor armies sits the formal cyber apparatus of the Revolutionary Guards and security agencies. Below them, a layer of incentivized volunteers and micro-influencers looking for access, contracts, or simple protection.
Add white-SIM privilege to this pyramid and you get a clear picture: Persian X is not a free-for-all. It’s a tiered information system, in which the right to speak, be heard, and stay online is tightly correlated with where you stand in relation to the state.
#Iran’s Digital Apartheid: Regime Loyalists Flood the #Internet While the Rest of the Nation Goes Darkhttps://t.co/qFQw7Bi9wc
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) June 20, 2025
Not a Poll, But a Dashboard
Persian-language social media will never tell you, with statistical purity, what “Iranians” want. It’s not a poll; it’s a dashboard from inside a controlled environment where
- access is political,
- narratives are seeded and boosted,
- and certain brands of “opposition” are carefully kept alive because they’re safe.
Ignoring that dashboard would be a mistake. Treating it as a raw, unmediated voice of the people would be an even bigger one. In real life, nobody trusts a life-and-death decision to what’s trending online; you don’t choose a surgeon, cross a border, or enter a war zone based on the loudest feed. By the same logic, decisions that can reshape an entire region or tilt global public opinion cannot be outsourced to Persian Twitter.
The smarter move is to treat it as infrastructure, not scripture: a signal to be cross-checked against hard facts on the ground, historical experience, independent reporting, and what happens to people once they log off and walk into the street. In a system that has turned internet access into a loyalty program, the way people appear online is already a political fact—but it’s only one data point. And if you’re in the business of understanding Iran—whether from a government office, a newsroom, or a university—you can’t afford to let a manipulated feed stand in for reality itself.