TY - JOUR
T1 - Platform surveillance and resistance in Iran and Russia
T2 - The case of Telegram
AU - Akbari, Azadeh
AU - Gabdulhakov, Rashid
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© The author(s), 2019.
PY - 2019/3/31
Y1 - 2019/3/31
N2 - Telegram messenger, created by an exiled Russian entrepreneur Pavel Durov, brands itself as a non-mainstream and non-Western guarantor of privacy in messaging. This paper offers an in-depth analysis of the challenges faced by the platform in Iran, with 59.5% of the population using its services, and in Russia, where Telegram is popular among the urban dissent. Both governments demanded access to the platform’s encrypted content and, with Durov’s refusal, took measures to ban it. Relying on the concept of surveillant assemblage (Haggerty and Ericson 2000), this paper portrays how authoritarian states disrupt, block, and police platforms that do not comply with their intrusive surveillance. Additionally, we consider the tools and actors that make up internet control assemblages as well as the resistance assemblages that take shape in response to such control.
AB - Telegram messenger, created by an exiled Russian entrepreneur Pavel Durov, brands itself as a non-mainstream and non-Western guarantor of privacy in messaging. This paper offers an in-depth analysis of the challenges faced by the platform in Iran, with 59.5% of the population using its services, and in Russia, where Telegram is popular among the urban dissent. Both governments demanded access to the platform’s encrypted content and, with Durov’s refusal, took measures to ban it. Relying on the concept of surveillant assemblage (Haggerty and Ericson 2000), this paper portrays how authoritarian states disrupt, block, and police platforms that do not comply with their intrusive surveillance. Additionally, we consider the tools and actors that make up internet control assemblages as well as the resistance assemblages that take shape in response to such control.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85066810182&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.24908/ss.v17i1/2.12928
DO - 10.24908/ss.v17i1/2.12928
M3 - Article
SN - 1477-7487
VL - 17
SP - 223
EP - 231
JO - Surveillance and society
JF - Surveillance and society
IS - 1-2
ER -