How Netblocks is Being Misled

January 4, 2026

Technical data shows that the government is trying to conceal digital repression through traffic engineering.

Traffic in provinces that are protest hotspots, such as Khuzestan and Lorestan, has sharply dropped, with their average share of the country’s total traffic falling to only 3.1% and 0.1%, while bandwidth in administrative-political centers like Tehran (with a dominant 50.8% share) has remained stable or even increased in a province like Alborz.

This redistribution ensures that the average total traffic in Iran does not plummet in international reports, keeping regional suppression hidden in statistics.

At the same time, Iran, with 78.1% bot traffic, has one of the highest rates globally. The activity of these government bots has intensified during protests for network monitoring and psychological operations, artificially maintaining total traffic to prevent the reality of restricted access from being exposed.

credits :

Access is control. Control is political.