Farzan Seyedi explains how Iran's internet blackout affected reporting, casualty estimates, protest coordination, and the international community's ability to understand what was happening inside the country.
An internet blackout is not simply a technical event. In an authoritarian system, it can become part of the security operation itself. That was one of the points I tried to communicate at the IAC Summit in January 2026, when the flow of information from Iran had been severely disrupted and families, journalists, activists, and governments were trying to understand the scale of the crackdown.
When a government limits connectivity, several things happen at once. Protesters have more difficulty coordinating. Families lose the ability to locate relatives. Videos take longer to leave the country. Hospitals, lawyers, journalists, and human rights organizations struggle to compare accounts. Rumors multiply because the normal methods of checking them disappear. The state gains more control over the timeline because it can act faster than evidence can be collected and distributed.
That was the environment in which I discussed casualty figures during the panel. I referred to very high estimates that were circulating through activist and opposition channels. Those numbers reflected the seriousness of what many people believed was happening, but the blackout made exact verification difficult. Any responsible publication using those figures should therefore attribute them to the speaker, network, or organization that reported them and update the numbers if later evidence changes the picture.
The larger point is that uncertainty should not be confused with absence. When independent verification is difficult because the government itself has restricted communications, it is unreasonable to conclude that nothing is happening simply because journalists cannot immediately produce a complete list of names and locations. The correct response is to document what can be documented, state clearly what remains uncertain, and continue collecting evidence.
Beni Sabti raised a related issue when he questioned the fairness of a situation in which senior regime figures could continue using global social media platforms while ordinary Iranians were cut off from one another. His comment captured a frustration many activists share: the same political system that restricts domestic access can still use international platforms to communicate its narrative abroad.
For Iranian activists, circumvention technology is therefore not an abstract digital-rights issue. Satellite connectivity, VPNs, secure messaging, censorship-resistant tools, and the ability to preserve and upload evidence can affect whether abuses are documented and whether people feel completely isolated from the outside world. Technology can also create risk, which is why operational security and source protection matter as much as access itself.
At the IAC panel, I repeatedly asked the audience and the media to be a voice for Iranians who could not communicate freely. I did not mean that outsiders should speak over Iranians or publish every claim they receive. I meant that a blackout should increase the international community's determination to keep searching for reliable information. Silence is exactly what an authoritarian blackout is designed to produce.