Deciphering the Valued’s Values

Of all the most widely discussed and reputedly formidable aspects of the Islamic Republic's social base of support, conservative online activists remain the least investigated and understood. Is this a community of blindly obedient civil servants receiving a paycheck to blog, or a genuine core of ideologically determined young Iranians who use social networking platforms and the space afforded by the internet to share and promote their worldview? “Unmasking the Arzeshi”, a new report produced by the London-based Small Media, an NGO that deals with the free flow of information, seeks to fill precisely this gap between perception and reality, documenting the scope of genuine activity amongst Iran's conservative cyber activists. The project assesses the network over a year-long period, spanning before and after Iran's 2013 presidential election, and uses that event to gauge the community's scale, preoccupations and online tendencies. We talked to James Marchant, Small Media's research director, to explore the report's surprising conclusions about the network's unity, openness to social media, and its reaction to President Hassan Rouhani's election.

To start with, can you define the term Arzeshi, which you use to describe the conservative cyber activists you've examined in the report? What are the kind of parameters around this term, who fits ideologically into that category and what is the volume of activity that we are talking about?

When we started this research we defined the activists we were investigating in a very broad sense as "conservatives". It was only when we started actually looking at the blogs that we saw that the community was self-defining as "Arzeshi", or "valued" – we haven’t got to the bottom of exactly where this term came from, but our best guess is that it originated in a speech made by the Supreme Leader, to whom the Arzeshi are near-universally loyal.

As for scope of the community, we saw in aftermath of the 2009 election protests a concerted effort by the state to expand the conservative community online in order to counter the online activism of reformists. So following on from this, in 2010 we saw the Iranian government claiming that they had 10,000-15,000 activists in training as bloggers. There were a number of events held in the following years that made clear the government’s intention to cultivate this community: in 2010 there were around 20 conferences held for conservative cyber activists, and the following year a number of blogging competitions were set up for the Arzeshi community.

We could see the government was trying to cultivate these kinds of online communities, and so in this research we wanted to evaluate how successful they’d been, and whether or not the official claims made in 2012 - of 35,000 Arzeshi activists - matched up with reality.

Were you able to gauge how many of these online activists were operating in a perfunctory, paycheck-collecting sort of way, as opposed to those authentically engaged ideologically with their online presence?

One of the things that we saw amongst the blogging community in particular, was that there were a lot of "junk" blogs that copied and pasted content from conservative news sites such as Fars News. These blogs were just pasting content without linking to any of the original websites – they were just "plugging" the Iranian blogosphere with conservative content. Whether these are paid activists or not, it was clear that the vast majority of the network that we looked at operated in this very disengaged, "throw-conservative-content-at-the- wall" kind of way. And then you see these other sorts of users, who serve as the leaders of the Arzeshi community and made up its "active" activist core: people like Vahid Yaminpour and Kobra Asoopar, whose blogs and social network pages function as the central hubs of the engaged segment of the Arzeshi community.

Is it useful then to conceive of this as a series of rings, with a core of very prominent activists who are clearly inspiring others, and then surrounded by rings of activity whose level of intensity and engagement gets diluted as you move out?

This description is actually quite similar to how we visualized the blogosphere in the report, as a set of spheres. We had an average of 67,000 sites and blogs in the Arzeshi network over the whole period of our research, but we only saw less than 1,000 of these sites and blogs being linked to by more than 25 other sites and blogs in the network. So I suppose we can consider these 1,000 or so sites as the "outer ring" of the network, with the 100 or so sites and blogs that received more than 100 links making up the inner core.

I was interested in the attention you paid to the Twitter activity because Twitter seems to have been marginal in terms of online activity in Iran, but its use is growing. Can you tell us a bit more about how conservative activists are using Twitter and whether they're interacting, trolling or conversing?

We mostly looked at Twitter in the context of the election campaign, so we were focusing on the candidates the Arzeshi Twitter users were supporting, and whether or not the supporters of each candidate were interacting with one another – whether, say, Jalili’s supporters bonded together and followed each other.

We did see these reciprocal follower-following relationships to a greater extent among Jalili supporters, but our main conclusion was that we saw very few Twitter users actually following each other – there are very few two-way connections between Twitter users. It seemed like a very disconnected community on Twitter, and the users we looked at tended to be throwing out content into the void, treating the site as more of a news feed than a social network, which we were quite surprised by.

So mainly they are just planting a flag on Twitter to have a presence there, but not really using it as a tool or platform.

Yes, they’re largely just setting up a token presence on Twitter. And this is the opposite of what we saw on Google Plus, where the Arzeshi were very active as a community – not just talking about political issues, but actually building personal connections, talking about their families and what they did during their holidays: very typical social network sort of content. These are the big differences between the two platforms.

Given the wealth of this content on Google Plus, I wonder whether you were able to assess their grievances and concerns outside of party politics. Beyond their ideological hang-ups, did you look at what they were most vocal about in terms of concerns with the country's economy, inflation, pollution, and these other problems?

They did tend to focus on foreign policy – they were very hesitant about Rouhani’s plans to engage with the West, but as we only covered the period of the presidential campaign we could only see their concerns about electoral promises rather than Rouhani’s actual policies.

But they were very hostile to Rouhani on this foreign policy basis, and they generally implied that Iran should be able to endure sanctions, that the country has an uncontestable right to nuclear energy, and that they should pursue this objective at all other costs.

The community did drop its focus on other issues from around May to June in order to focus on the presidential elections, with a lot of debate taking place between users about different conservative candidates. Saeed Jalili had the biggest base of support, along with Haddad-Adel, with both of these candidates seeming to gain a lot of credibility on the basis of their strong foreign policy credentials and hostility to the idea of increased engagement with the West. Hostility to the US, Israel and Europe drove quite a lot of the discussions.

Was there anything that surprised you in your findings?

Mainly what I touched on before: the fact that, especially on Google Plus, these are genuine communities of very opinionated, very conservative, but ultimately fairly ordinary people. We were expecting to see these political activists just spreading propaganda and the ideological line of the state, but they were actually engaging with each other on a very personal level, and cultivating their own community of like-minded individuals. So that was perhaps a little unexpected.

But also, in a more politically-surprising sense, in the aftermath of the election we saw a number of conservative activists attempting to "claim" Rouhani's victory as their own. These individuals were trying to frame him simply as a conservative loyal to Khamenei, and were arguing that he would soon be rejected by his reformist supporters as his policies begin to disappoint them.

This isn’t to say that a lot of Arzeshi didn’t view his election as a cataclysmic event for Iranian conservatism – a lot did – but the community was a lot more divided than we though it might be.

That’s interesting I suppose because Rouhani's relationship with the Supreme Leader is quite strong and you've identified loyalty to Ayatollah Khamenei as one of the binding ties among the group. That must inevitably temper their reaction to his victory.

Absolutely. After all, loyalty to Khamenei absolutely defines this community – their devotion to him, and to the ideology of velayat-e faqih, is the one unifying feature of the group. Their blogs and websites reflect this devotion to him by linking in huge numbers to his personal website. And then we see Arzeshi posts on Google Plus made by figures like Vahid Yaminpour, in which he talks about meeting the Supreme Leader. Yaminpour went onto receive a great deal of adulation from his Google Plus followers as a result of this post, with a lot of Arzeshi congratulating him on the face-to-face meeting with the Leader they admired.

Are the Arzeshi mainly on Google Plus as a sort of rejection of Facebook, which other Iranians use very energetically despite it being blocked?

Partly, but one of the reasons that the Arzeshi used the platform so widely is that for a very long period of time Google Plus was unblocked – it was the only global social networking site that wasn’t filtered by the state. It’s currently in an ambiguous position: some Iranians are reporting that it’s being fully blocked, whereas others are claiming that it’s still accessible. But during our research, it was the one major platform that they could engage on without having to evade the Iranian Filternet.

Saying that, we also saw a large number of Arzeshi blogs linking away to blocked social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, along with major sites like YouTube – although they claim to be completely loyal to the state, a lot of Arzeshi are willing to bend the rules around the Filternet in order to broaden their reach and establish communities on different platforms.

The accompanying internet infrastructure report you released alongside the Arzeshi project looks at the rise in filtering of mobile phone apps, which suggests that the size of the internet-enabled smart phone market is growing. Do you have any sense of how many Iranians are using these devices? What are the apps that are being filtered?

There are no official statistics, although you can find useful information about it here. In general, the apps being filtered are popular communication such as Viber, Tango, etc.

The report mentions the conflict between the Rouhani administration and the Internet Filtering Committee, a conflict that looks to become more heated down the line. Where does the Committee to Determine Instances of Criminal Content (CDICC) fit in institutionally?

The CDICC has 13 members, of which six are representatives from the government and selected by ministers or the ministries. The CDICC secretary is appointed by the General Prosecutor of Iran, who is selected by head of the judiciary system. This means the government cannot change the secretary.