Social media is a mean for people all over the world to communicate; communication with people around the world and knowledge about the world helps people to have a better understanding on the living situation and human rights in different countries which does not suit governments who want their people to be foolish so they can rule them easier.

Now I want to talk about social media in Iran specifically!

From the beginning, social media was not something that the dictatorships would like the improvement of it among their people, because they had less control over it compared to society.

In Iran, people are usually muzzled to talk about the corrupted economic situation which was directed toward the government. After the huge improvement social media and internet had in the 21st century, people started using social media as a mean to talk and write and publish their thoughts and anger towards the government!

A usage of social media in Iran has been revolutionary protists! As an example, I would like to name Facebook. After Iran’s tenth presidential election, which was held on June 12th, 2009, people were not satisfied with the result. The majority of the people were angry and believed that government had cheated. People did protist to show their anger which led to the government’s violent reaction. Thus, Facebook group chats became critical to plan the protists. It was the first time in Iran’s history that social media was used for such a serious manner. Actually, it wasn’t successful, but scared the government enough, to start the censorship of all the popular social media platforms among people. The censorship was not successful and did not stop people. This behavior of the government brought VPNs to application stores and made them so useful.

After Facebook, it was other platforms turn to be censored when they became popular. wechat, Viber and a lot of other platforms were censored in the past couple of years. Now the most common application among Iranians is Telegram. In February 2016 it was announced that telegram had 100 million users and more than 40 million users of this Russian app were Iranians. This application has been used for about 5 years and is so popular in Iran. No surprise, it was banned and censored starting last year, but this time people did not move to another app. Telegram is not an application that people use for fun, this application has provided a lot of people a good online job and a lot of people are working through it. Instagram is also so popular among teenagers and adults. Instagram has multiple usages as well. For teenagers, it has fun atmospheres and other people are working with it. Also, Instagram and Telegram have provided a good opportunity for talented people to show themselves and have been a good platform for them to publish their work. Since the users are a lot, people can be seen and shared so quickly. Instagram has been a good mean for talented users to introduce themselves faster, without any help from anyone. Social media in Iran is not just for fun; actually, due to the corrupted economy, people make a living with it. Besides Facebook, Telegram, Instagram, Viber, and wechat I would name twitter which is also used a lot. Twitter is also censored but it is even used by the government. The most popular Iranian twitter account is the Foreign minister of Islamic Republic of Iran’s account, Javad Zarif. When you go through most popular Iranian accounts on Instagram and Twitter you see government members on top, even the supreme leader of Iran has accounts on social media platforms that are censored; which is silly!

This is a picture of Eddie Murphy being interviewed. He made a wise statement when this picture was taken. This image is usually being used for the situations when a person wants to show that he is smart. This meme goes with our story because in the story the young lady who is not rich, actually makes a wise decision and marry an old rich man that can cover her and her parents lives and help them survive. And also, the old guy does not ask for her love which is great, and she doesn’t have to pretend she loves him!