Iran’s presidential chief of staff said the government has begun revoking all forms of unfiltered internet access granted to select users – including senior officials – as scrutiny intensifies over privileged connections unavailable to the general public.
The change is already underway and applies to “everyone who uses such lines,” Mohsen Haji-Mirzaei told reporters on Thursday. Any revision of national filtering policy, he added, lies exclusively with the Supreme Cyberspace Council, not the Supreme National Security Council. “The council decided on filtering, and the council must decide on changes,” he said.
Unequal access exposed by platform updates
Iran maintains some of the world’s strictest online controls, blocking X, Facebook, YouTube, Telegram and WhatsApp for ordinary users, who rely on unstable VPNs frequently disrupted by authorities.
But recent updates on X revealed that several lawmakers, government spokespeople and pro-government media figures were posting from inside Iran without VPNs. The disclosures pointed to their use of government-issued unrestricted mobile lines, often referred to domestically as “white SIMs,” which bypass national filtering and throttling systems.
The revelations triggered widespread public anger, highlighting a stark digital divide between citizens and officials at a time when President Masoud Pezeshkian had campaigned on restoring open access.
His administration has yet to lift filtering; in his first meeting of the Supreme Cyberspace Council, Pezeshkian instead stressed implementing the Supreme Leader’s directives on internet governance and ordered action against the thriving VPN market.
Limited room for reform
Asked whether cabinet members would also lose their privileged access, Haji-Mirzaei replied: “Anyone who has such a line.” The council, he said, had set conditions for reconsidering filtering and that preparatory work was underway.
The shift follows weeks of public backlash over unequal access, showing how the administration has so far failed to deliver on its pledge to ease restrictions within Iran’s tightly controlled online system.
