Following The Ayatollah: In their fight against Telegram, Iran and Russia are trying to solve the central dilemma of digital authoritarianism, but are so far failing

In its fight against Telegram, the Kremlin is largely following the path of the Iranian authorities, where the platform effectively became an ‘alternative internet’ as early as the mid-2010s.

In 2018, both regimes attempted to block Telegram almost simultaneously and both failed. In Iran, this led to widespread adoption of VPNs, while the messenger retained a central role in the information environment despite remaining formally banned. The attempt to introduce a ‘national messenger’ as an alternative was largely unsuccessful.

In Russia, Roskomnadzor also lost the technological battle with Telegram and was forced to reinstate the platform in 2020. As a result, in recent years Telegram has become the country’s main information and communication platform, encompassing opposition segments, state propaganda, and serving as an indispensable tool not only for various communities, businesses, and media, but also for state structures, which use it for both horizontal and vertical communication.

In preparation for a renewed offensive against Telegram, the Kremlin, following the example of the Iranian regime, attempted to create its own national messenger. However, like Tehran, it has failed to make it competitive and has been forced to rely on coercive measures.

Slowing Telegram down through targeted ‘degradation’ is a key element of this strategy. Yet the platform’s deeply rooted role in public, economic, and governmental life makes an immediate blockade practically impossible.

The challenge facing the Kremlin is a key dilemma of digital authoritarianism: it must drive out a loyal segment of the platform’s audience to reduce the social and political costs of a complete block. However, the experience of the Iranian regime and the Kremlin's previous attempts to restrict YouTube show that such pressure leads to both a partial outflow of users and the increasingly widespread use of VPNs.

Unless Russian authorities take extraordinary and high-risk measures, it is likely that this struggle between technology and coercion will continue for some time.

Iran starts and fails

Telegram creator Pavel Durov, commenting on the Russian authorities' renewed attack on the platform, wrote that the attempt to move its users to the national messenger MAX, a ‘state-controlled application created for surveillance and political censorship’, will suffer the same defeat as the Iranian authorities’ attempt eight years ago: ‘Despite the ban, most Iranians still use Telegram, bypassing censorship’.

The Iranian experience is crucial for understanding trends and prospects for internet censorship in Russia. Both Putin's and the Ayatollah’s regime have been fighting Durov’s platform for eight years, sometimes following the same path closely, sometimes diverging slightly. The outcomes are also broadly similar: after eight years of struggle, the influence and infrastructural role of the messenger have only grown in both countries.

Iranian media analyst and political prisoner Hossein Derakhshan wrote in 2018 that, by the mid-2010s, Telegram had effectively become an uncensored alternative internet in Iran, replacing email, chat services, forums, blogs, news sites, e-commerce, social networks, dating services, and even television. This popularity was partly due to the platform’s convenience, but primarily reflected the intensification of internet censorship, which began in Iran considerably earlier than in Russia. Following the 2009 protests, almost all foreign blogging platforms, social networks, and messaging services were blocked. In the spring of 2014, an Iranian court blocked Viber over alleged links to Israel, prompting millions of Iranians to adopt Telegram.

Being of Russian origin, the platform apparently aroused less suspicion from the Iranian authorities.For a time, Telegram became a universal messenger and communications channel in the country, even being used by state television to gather feedback from viewers. However, in 2016 Iranian conservatives began to perceive its ‘harmful’ influence. In the parliamentary elections, reformists, who, according to the well-known digital technology portal Mashable, relied heavily on social media for campaigning, won a majority. In 2017, the reformist president Hassan Rouhani, with very limited access to Iranian media, was able to secure a second term in part through extensive use of Instagram and Telegram in his campaign, according to many analysts, including experts from Harvard University's Internet Monitor project. Keeping Telegram accessible to Iranians was one of his election promises. Conservatives subsequently began a campaign of harassment against Telegram, intimidating owners of popular channels and banning not only the platform’s use on television but also any mention of it on air.

The first serious attempts to block Telegram, which by that time was already used by 40 million Iranians (almost half the population), occurred during anti-government protests in December 2017 and January 2018, which were largely coordinated via Telegram. The block lasted for two weeks. Even after it ended, state media continued to push narratives about the platform’s harm to adolescent mental health, family values, and data privacy, preparing public opinion for a permanent ban.

At the end of April 2018, an Iranian court prohibited the use of Telegram, citing ‘numerous complaints from Iranian citizens regarding the social network’ and ‘requests from security authorities’, Reuters reported. However, in the first two weeks of the ban, four out of the five most popular search queries in Iran were related to tools for circumventing restrictions, experts from Internet Monitor report. Downloads of the VPN application Psiphon increased tenfold in a few days, reaching 14 million daily users. The Ministry of Information and Communications Technology began blocking circumvention tools, but this caused widespread internet disruptions and disrupted hundreds of Iranian businesses and services. One month after the ban, Telegram remained the country’s most downloaded application alongside VPN services.

Officially, Telegram remains banned in Iran to this day. However, in 2021, the Iranian Statistical Centre reported that approximately 45 million people continued to use it in the country. Today, the five largest Iranian Telegram channels have between 3.6 million and 6.3 million subscribers each (representing 5–10% of the adult population), according to TGStat. And in a survey conducted by GAMAAN in the summer of 2023, 43% of those surveyed reported using Telegram frequently, 29% said they use it occasionally, and another 8% said they use it rarely (totalling 80%). The 2024 Freedom House report Freedom on the Net also noted that Telegram in Iran ‘remains a key platform for news, protest coordination, and everyday communication’. In 2025, there was even talk of a possible unblocking of the service. The Ministry of Information and Communication Technology demanded that the messenger team assist the judicial authorities, block messages inciting ethnic tension, and make other symbolic concessions.

At the same time, Telegram continues to be used not only by ordinary citizens, but also by government agencies. According to a report by the organisation Human Rights Activists, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) actively uses the messenger to promote propaganda, intimidate activists, and spread disinformation. During the most recent protests, even amid strict internet shutdowns, authorities continued to use IRGC-affiliated Telegram channels for propaganda purposes. This is analysed in a report by the Israeli Institute for Counter-Terrorism, ICT. The Iranian state thus effectively acknowledges that if you want to be heard, you need to use Telegram.

The triumph of resistance and the ‘sponge’ effect

The Russian authorities' struggle against Telegram began almost in step with Iran’s campaign. Their determined attack on the messenger in spring 2018 may also have been inspired by the Iranian protests, as well as by the activation of Russian protests (in 2017–early 2018, Alexei Navalny organised a series of demonstrations in Moscow and other cities). However, as early as autumn 2017, Roskomnadzor (RKN) demanded that Telegram provide the ‘messenger’s encryption keys’ under the so-called Yarovaya package. Pavel Durov refused. As a result, on 13 April 2018, the Tagansky Court approved RKN’s request to block the messenger. This was two weeks before Tehran’s court ruling.

Telegram adopted a strategy of resistance against the blocks, leading to a period of positional technological warfare: the platform automatically identified IP addresses blocked by RKN and switched to new ones from cloud services, while RKN’s ‘blanket’ IP blocking (up to 20 million addresses at one point) caused widespread outages in the Russian internet. The social effect was striking: the Telegram audience did not shrink; its growth accelerated, as monitoring services recorded. In 2019, the Russian authorities shifted their tactics: the ‘sovereign internet’ law required providers to install Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) equipment, capable of analysing and blocking traffic at the data packet content level. Yet even this did not immediately change the situation.

On the contrary, by the summer of 2020, the RKN effectively admitted defeat: the agency announced that it was lifting restrictions on the messenger, whose management had expressed its ‘readiness to counter terrorism and extremism’. In reality, given the technical impossibility of blocking the platform, Telegram continued to strengthen its role as an information infrastructure, not only for private communication, media, and business, but also for state functions. The authors of the bill submitted to the Duma to unblock Telegram noted that during the pandemic, government agencies and services used it ‘as one of their main information resources.’

From this point on, the messenger entered a new, triumphant period in Russia. Its monthly audience (MAU) reached 94 million by the end of 2025, according to Mediascope, or even 105 million, according to a joint study by LiveDune and MTS AdTech. This is 13–15 times higher than the level at the end of 2017, that is before the initial blocks (7.2 million). The paradox is that, as in Iran in the mid-2010s, Telegram’s rapid ‘universalisation’ was aided by increased internet censorship. As RKN expanded blocking practices for websites and services, Telegram, impervious to blocks, increasingly became a universal portal for Russian users to access the full information and public environment.

The onset of a full-scale information war and the sharp tightening of censorship became another driver of the messenger’s growth. According to Mediascope, the average daily reach of VKontakte increased from 31% of the population at the end of 2021 to 47% at the end of 2025, while Telegram’s reach rose from 18% to 60%. Even television propagandists migrated to Telegram to be present in this nationwide information hub and escape the pensioner-dominated TV ghetto. This outcome partly reflects a lesson Russian authorities had failed to learn from Iran: chaotic content and social media blocks, in the presence of an unblocked Telegram, turn the platform into a ‘sponge’, absorbing both content and audience, and, in turn, creating a universal infrastructure of networked publicity. Telegram has thus integrated all aspects of this infrastructure, including functions as a state propaganda channel and a tool for vertical government communication: governors and district heads use their Telegram channels to convey essential news and decisions, issue warnings, and circulate public appeals. The platform’s network coordination capabilities, used by opposition activists during protests, proved highly relevant in the context of military operations.

Compulsory service and the ‘Kalashnikov effect’

Even during the first campaign against Telegram, experts noted that the only way to fully block it would be through a ‘whitelist’ internet, or ‘positive filtering’, where only approved content is allowed rather than prohibited content being blocked. Although Russian authorities actively tested such technologies in 2025 (→ Re:Russia: Whitelists for Dark Times), they primarily adopted a strategy of soft power: creating a national messenger modelled on China’s WeChat, intended to transfer Telegram’s social, state, and business infrastructure to the domestic platform and enable Telegram’s marginalisation and potential blocking.

Iran had a similar experience. Unlike Russian authorities, when they attempted to block Telegram in 2018, they already had a partially prepared alternative – the officially launched national messenger Soroush. This platform largely replicated the popular functionality of Durov’s Telegram, but added religious and political elements, for example, stickers depicting women with ‘Death to America’ posters and anti-Israel emojis. Developed under the auspices of the state television and radio broadcasting company, the messenger app had a bad reputation among users from the outset as a means of control and surveillance, and was also technically poor, according to a review by the human rights organisation Article19. The authorities used coercive measures to promote Soroush, prohibiting state institutions from using any foreign messaging applications. Iran's spiritual leader Ali Khamenei announced the closure of his Telegram channel in favour of the national messenger (though the English version of his channel remains on Telegram). During COVID-19, educational institutions, including schools and universities, were transferred to Soroush.

Although the authorities have repeatedly claimed that the service had 20 million or even 35 million users, an official from Iran's National Cyberspace Centre admitted in 2021 that Soroush had 12.2 million registered accounts, of which only around 2.2 million were active. According to GAMAAN, in 2023, five years after its launch, only 3% of respondents said they used Soroush frequently, 5% occasionally, and 9% rarely. As a result, the service’s practical reach is very limited, largely confined to the administrative sector, where citizens are compelled to interact with the state.

The Russian authorities are generally following the same trajectory. Immediately after the launch of the national messenger MAX and the start of its aggressive promotion, analyst Maxim Trudolyubov demonstrated in a special Re:Russia report that the Chinese super-app WeChat underwent a long period of market development before becoming universal and integrated into state control systems. Unlike China, the development of the Russian internet economy has largely followed a Western model, where super-apps have not taken root, partly because competing ecosystems formed organically at an earlier stage. Today, Russia has the Sber ecosystem, the Yandex ecosystem, and a distinct Telegram ecosystem. There is little room for a super-app without a direct conflict with these well-established and far more developed players. Finally, Trudolyubov notes that the average user is willing to sacrifice some privacy and data control in exchange for convenience, speed, and integration, but the convenience must be genuine. This likely explains the failure of the Iranian messenger, which, under state pressure, became a niche product within the ecosystem of government coercion, but did not capture user habits and preferences.

By attempting to create a national super-app with state funding and almost from scratch, while competing with several mature ecosystems, Russian authorities effectively committed themselves to relying on coercion as the main instrument in promoting their ‘soft power’. In Russian parlance, whatever they try to do always ends up like a Kalashnikov. Consequently, the latest phase of the Russian authorities’ assault on internet freedoms, linked to the launch of the national messenger, comprises a set of measures: (1) limiting the functionality of other messengers, (2) forcing users onto MAX (mandatory pre-installation on all new devices, migration of state agencies and institutions to MAX, and integration with the ‘Gosuslugi’ government services), (3) populating MAX with clones of popular Telegram channels, and (4) deliberately ‘degrading’ Telegram alongside public threats of its complete blocking, intended to push users toward the new platform.

The reduction in the functionality of WhatsApp and Telegram, which are both extremely popular among Russians, began in August 2025, when the authorities restricted voice and video calls in both applications. However, surveys show that this method of communication is not very popular in Russia: it is used by about 15% of citizens (→ Re:Russia: Digital Curtain). As a result, users did not migrate to MAX but mostly returned to traditional mobile voice services, according to Kommersant. At the same time, according to Mediascope data shows that WhatsApp’s audience declined only slightly, from 82.9 million daily users in July 2025 to 80 million in November, indicating that the call restrictions did not trigger a major user exodus. In November, RKNinitiated a new phase of gradual ‘degradation’ of the service to push users toward MAX, with the number of complaints about problems with sending messages and files rising sharply. By December, Mediascope recorded a fall in WhatsApp’s daily audience to 69.8 million (–10.2 million), while Telegram’s audience surged (+6.2 million).

At the same time, as was the case in Iran with the Soroush messenger, the figures showing the expansion of the MAX audience are growing rapidly, but suspiciously ‘fluctuating’. In Mediascope analytics for the ‘Messengers’ category, MAX appears in August with a monthly audience of 32 million, then grows by around 10 million each month to reach 70 million in December. Daily audience rose from 7 million in August to 42 million in December, i.e. a sixfold increase. This dynamic is difficult to reconcile with the lack of significant migration from other messengers following the call restrictions, suggesting that the slowdown of WhatsApp in December likely redirected a substantial portion of its users to Telegram rather than to MAX.

Average daily audience of messengers, 2025, million people

According to data from the MaxStat platform, which was analysed by Kommersant, by the end of December the messenger’s audience stood at 29 million users. In the second half of 2025, the total number of channels on MAX increased to 81,000. However, the majority were created by state institutions, around 50,000, with a further 10,000 belonging to local authorities. Together these account for 75% of all channels. Another 13,000, or 15%, are local community pages. All remaining content therefore amounts to just 8,000 channels, largely duplicates of Telegram channels. A similar picture is painted by February data from MaxStat, analysed by the publication Agentstvo. Official statistics report 172,000 channels and 85.5 million subscribers, though this is a different metric from audience reach. Agentstvo’s analysis indicates that 70% of channels were created by state bodies and institutions. Finally, more than half of the 30 most popular Russian-language Telegram channels, which together have approximately 87 million subscribers, had by the end of 2025 begun duplicating their content on MAX. Yet their combined audience there amounts to only 1.4 million, according to Kommersant's calculations. This ratio may be the most realistic reflection of the platforms’ relative scale.

At the moment, MAX’s statistics appear openly inflated, and there is no reliable evidence of mass user interest. This is unsurprising. As repeatedly noted, the messenger’s functionality remains limited and its reputation compromised. It is possible that MAX will be further developed over time. For now, however, events are unfolding along an Iranian trajectory, and in the medium term any significant migration of users is likely to depend on the forced ‘degradation’ of Telegram.

Slowing Telegram and the dilemma of collateral damage

The systematic slowing down of the messenger began on 10–11 February and was immediately officially confirmed by Roskomnadzor. According to user complaints collected by the Na Svyazi project, on 10 February, slowdowns were observed in 15 regions and on 11 February in seven additional regions. These figures are modest compared with the large-scale mobile internet shutdowns across dozens of regions during 2025 (→ Re:Russia: Whitelists for Dark Times). In the following days, the number of complaints decreased slightly and then increased again on 18 February, while on the 19th the situation appeared relatively normal, according to Downdetector. The precise scale of the slowdown remains unclear, and for now its media impact may exceed its actual effect.

The most forceful protest rhetoric came from pro-war Z-bloggers, who claimed that the slowdown amounted to sabotage against Russian forces fighting in Ukraine, who rely heavily on the messenger. The channel LikbeZ, for example, calls Telegram a ‘field headquarters in your pocket’, without which coordination efficiency would decline sharply. On 11 February, the day after the slowdown was announced, the parliamentary factions of the Communist Party and A Just Russia staged a demarche in the State Duma, initiating a formal inquiry to Roskomnadzor regarding the legal grounds for the measure. The proposal did not pass, but 77 deputies voted in favour, according to RBC. In a consolidated repressive autocracy, such ‘boldness’ may indicate either factional disagreements over the slowdown decision or that the measure announced by Roskomnadzor represents a trial balloon, signalling to businesses and other stakeholders that they should begin seeking alternatives to Telegram.

The role of the service in Russia’s state, economic and public life is now so significant that an immediate block appears virtually impossible. As Iranian authorities did before them, Russian officials are attempting to resolve the central dilemma of digital authoritarianism: how to minimise collateral damage when imposing restrictions. The objective is first to allow the loyal segment of users to adapt, thereby reducing potential social and economic costs, and only then to apply harsher measures against the remaining disloyal users (→ V-Dem: Digital Repression in Autocracies).

Most likely, pressure in this direction will continue, and local problems with access to Telegram and its functionality (uploading files, images and videos) will recur and potentially intensify. At the same time, as demonstrated by the Iranian experience and the practice of slowing down YouTube in Russia, such a strategy contributes to the increasingly widespread normalisation of VPN use. In this respect, the Russian authorities’ campaign against YouTube offers a revealing model (→ Re:Russia: YouTube Window).

The slowdown of the video service began in the second half of 2024. According to Mediascope, its monthly audience in Russia stood at 96 million at that point; by mid-2025 it was estimated at 76 million, and by December at 67.5 million. After eighteen months of throttling, there is evident progress: the audience has declined by nearly one third. However, this remains far from a ‘complete block’. Moreover, these figures may not fully capture reality, particularly under conditions of social pressure and the use of circumvention tools. Unlike Mediascope, Brand Analytics measures social platforms by the number of content creators and posts. Their data suggest that YouTube’s trajectory resembles the earlier pattern observed with Instagram: after a sharp initial decline during the first phase of restrictions, the number of authors and posts begins to recover gradually. According to Brand Analytics, in 2025, the number of Russian-language YouTube authors increased by 7%, while content volume grew by nearly 20%, following declines of 34% and 22% respectively in the previous year.

In sum, the fight against social networks and popular digital services in Iran and Russia has so far developed along very similar lines. The authoritarian state seeks to create a domestic alternative to the targeted platform in order to reduce the negative side effects of blocking it. Yet the technological sophistication, functionality and social appeal of these alternatives lag significantly behind the original. As a result, users divide between exit and adaptation, primarily through VPN use, which slows the outflow of audiences and prevents the authorities from achieving the desired effect. Unless Russian authorities resort to extraordinary coercive measures, this confrontation between technology and repression is likely to continue for some time.