Iranian officials have started throttling internet access and have cooked up a plan to yank the country off the global internet completely. The aim is to stop Israeli cyberattacks. Citizens are being told to bin WhatsApp, which the regime now says, without a shred of evidence, has been turned into a surveillance tool by Israel.
Meta’s messaging app is wildly popular in Iran, but the government has deemed it a Trojan horse, a claim denied by WhatsApp.
Telegram has reportedly been added to the banned list, too.
This censorship sprint follows the outbreak of war after Israel’s 12 June strike. Internet outages are piling up, with Iranians reporting patchy or completely dead connections, including to critical services like maps and messaging.
Cloudflare confirmed two of Iran’s leading mobile networks effectively vanished on Tuesday. NetBlocks, which monitors internet access, recorded a sharp dip in Iranian traffic at 5:30 p.m. local time that day.
Even VPNs, the go-to workaround for state censorship, are being throttled to the point of uselessness. That means access to sites like Instagram and Facebook is being smothered more aggressively than usual.
While no one has officially fingered Israel for the outages, the regime has decided it does not need help blaming its enemies. According to Tasnim, the Revolutionary Guards' in-house media arm, Iran will still offer a watered-down version of its national intranet. However, two Iranian insiders told The New York Times that even this internal system could be reduced by up to 80 per cent.
Meanwhile, Amazon’s YouTube advertising has been flooded by paid-for Israeli propaganda justifying its air strikes on Iran.
Reddit users have noticed pro-Israel ads played before their YouTube videos, specifically justifying strikes on Iran:
“I got a strange AD justifying Israel’s attack on Iran. “Since a few days, I almost always stumble across this … ‘ad’ from the Israeli government … shown in different languages” — r/israelexposed
These ads appear to be targeted across Europe, including Germany, the UK, Italy, and France and stress that Israel’s fight is with the regime, not the Iranian people, and frame its actions as defensive, urging viewers to distinguish between the leadership and the population.
Israel’s Amazon advertisements in the past have attracted criticism for pushing the line of truth far beyond what was reasonable. In one case, it showed happy Israelis delivering aid packages to joyful Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. The ads depict scenes of smiling children and aid trucks, with slogans like “Smiles don’t lie, Hamas does.” Investigations found the adverts hid issues such as blockades and even deadly crowding during aid distribution