Yes it is a value judgement, but Iran's government is nothing if not oppressive and authoritarian. Until recently the US had taken pride in being nothing like a regime, but that may change in the coming years.
I tend to believe the US is already past that point. It's just people are not really realizing that yet. Might take the next election for them to realize. That will be to late however.
I hope so much that this is wrong and the US turns out to be more resilient than it looks like from the outside though.
Isn't this "son of the late Shah" a guy from the US?
Also, if the US wanted to do a regime change, they'd just move in militarily a la Venezuela and Trump would be talking about it non-stop. He's not the subtle type, I promise. We'd already know if they were involved.
https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/2026-01-10/ty-artic...
It's almost sure that both US and Israel are meddling with the current situation. That doesn't mean the situation isn't also started by and wanted by the population.
For a comparison point in the past, the civil rights and antiwar movements in the US were grass-roots movements started by local people with legitimate claims. At the same time, opponents of the US like USSR were involved in stirring these movements, because of course they would.
There isn't much you can infer about the legitimacy of a movement by learning that the movement is helped by foreign intelligence agencies.
The best way you can avoid this kind of confusion is 1) make a society in which malicious actors don't have many latent issues to stir, and 2) make it so your country's intelligence agencies aren't malicious actors. There isn't much else to do.
Even the Romans knew that if you wanted to stay in power you had to provide bread and circuses.
Way worse outcomes.
I'm sure the Iranian regime would live to jam starlink, but i don't think we have any ability to know what is actually happening here.
The article claims 80% packetloss. That's still 1 in 5 packets getting through. That is annoying but not going to stop information getting out.
I also wonder, if all other coms are cut off, is it possible star link in the country is just overloaded?
https://matrix.org/blog/2019/03/12/breaking-the-100bps-barri...
[Of course you could say the same thing about TCP i suppose depending on which congestion control algorithm is in use]
It's a pattern by now: whenever a government wants to do something awful, it shuts down internet access - so that no one can hear it, see it or coordinate a response. And Starlink becomes a lifeline that the regime would rather people didn't have.
This is why all of those "national great firewalls" shouldn't exist in the first place. If you give a government a capability to restrict access to whatever it wants and enact a network blackout whenever it wants, it's a matter of time until it gets abused.
Not even Starlink has the balls to oppose the likes of Russia and China directly - they aren't operating there without a permit, sadly. But at least they don't kneel before every two-bit dictatorship and cave to every single "we want you to do censorship on our behalf" demand. Way better than what most tech companies do now.
And this makes sense for an organization thats so highly reliant on federal support, vs Apple and Google who only have to just stay somewhat in the states good graces.
Apple and Google have done more than just stay in good graces of governments by getting rid of apps governments don't like, they haven't enforced their terms against X, and given tens of millions to Trump's ballroom.
And no Tesla factories in Iran I suppose helps too :)
ggm•7h ago
Media is information rich. Maybe we're beyond a samzdat moment and the value in comms is contextual immediacy of live feeds, text can squeeze alongside.
Long ago, broadcast quality TV was shipped as slow feed. Maybe a tiktok generation goes back there: use a phone on the street (probably surreptitiously) do post production and upload asynchronously on 30% packetloss or worse for redistribution.
bawolff•6h ago
The people filming protests in iran are probably not in range of their home starlink connected wifi. They are almost certainly filming stuff offline then uploading it later, not livestreaming.