Open an Iranian social media feed this week, and a strange thing shows up between the currency screenshots and the shaky street videos: mountains.
One mountain, again and again.
Mount Damavand, the snow-capped cone that hangs over Tehran on clear days, turned into a recurring post.
Sometimes it appears as a clean photograph, blue sky, and sharp ridge line. Sometimes it shows up as a grainy clip from a car window. People around the world asked the obvious question: Why are they sharing pictures of this mountain?
Damavand sits in the Iranian imagination as both geography and a story.
Zahhak’s chain: How mythology fuels Iran’s unrest
In Iranian mythology, a tyrant named Zahhak becomes a symbol of cruelty and corruption, and the legend places him in chains at Damavand.
The tale includes a common thread in Persian storytelling: a ruler who demands a steady human toll, until ordinary people push back and a humble figure – such as Kaveh the blacksmith – ignites a revolt. In some versions, Zahhak’s punishment ends at Damavand, trapped there as the mountain smokes and rumbles above the capital.
That myth is now interwoven with today’s protests. The mountain from the story lets people point at a tyrant without writing the tyrant’s name.
Then, the news caught up with the myth.
Iran’s latest wave of unrest began with the kind of trigger that regimes fear because it spreads through every class: money.
Shopkeepers in Tehran’s large mobile phone market shuttered their stores, and the anger pulled in students and more cities as the rial kept sliding and prices kept climbing. The protests did not reach the scale of the 2022 uprising, yet the tone shifted quickly, and the content online sharpened.
One city name started popping up in the feeds: Fasa, in Fars province. Reuters reported attempts to reach a local government building there, and local officials blamed inflation and “hostile media” for stirring up the crowd.
In Tehran, students joined in at multiple universities, and authorities answered with arrests, a heavy security presence, and a sudden, last-minute holiday that left streets quieter the next morning. Officials attributed the holiday to cold weather and energy saving. The timing carried its own message.
On social media, however, the message looked different. Over the past 24 hours, the conversation moved from general economic despair to high-velocity anti-regime content, built to spread fast and provoke a response.
Hashtags did what hashtags always do in moments like this: they turned fear into a word. “Dollar” remained a constant because the exchange rate has become a national obsession and a daily humiliation.
“Reza Pahlavi” surged as chants and clips pushed the exiled prince into the center of the online conversation, with crowds in some videos calling for help and for a return to monarchy-style leadership.
Iran’s opposition behaves like a crowded room with people shouting over one another: liberals, leftists, secular nationalists, monarchists, labor activists, students, disgruntled merchants, families crushed by prices, and citizens who want the police off their bodies and the state out of their bedrooms. They share an enemy, but they do not always share a plan.
One tactic of the regime aims for “ventilation,” a controlled release of pressure that avoids full collapse.
Reuters reported that, after protests spread to universities, the government publicly offered dialogue framed around listening to economic grievances and promising reforms. Another tactic aims for intimidation: visible force in the streets, arrests, and the steady warning that unrest becomes “insecurity” in the language of prosecutors.
The fight over connectivity is what makes this week’s protests different from those in the past. Freedom House says that Iran has one of the most restrictive internet environments in the world, with widespread blocking, heavy filtering, and arrests for online speech.
The state learned years ago that shutting down the whole country would be very bad for the economy, so it uses targeted disruption instead.
During major protests, “curfew-like” mobile internet outages that lasted from the afternoon to the night were imposed, while other connections stayed partially active.
People now have a “digital curfew” in their heads. People expect to be throttled in hot zones during protests. They make plans around it. They move from one platform to another. For many Iranians, especially those whose jobs depend on it, Instagram is still like a public square.
Telegram is the coordination layer, where channels send out videos, locations, and quick updates. When the government squeezes one pipe, the pressure moves to the next.
This is where VPNs come in, and it’s also where the risks get bigger. Iranians use VPNs to get around blocked sites, lower the risk of being watched, and keep posting when their internet speed slows down.
During the Israel-Iran war in June, tech sites reported huge increases in VPN use. One report said that at its peak, demand rose by more than 700%, even though access to VPNs was being restricted.
The exact numbers may change from day to day, but the direction stays the same: unrest leads to circumvention, and the state looks for the tools that help people get around it.
This game of cat and mouse shapes the story of the protest. It also affects who gets to speak. Urban teens who know more about technology are louder online.
Smaller towns show up later, usually through reposts and diaspora amplifiers. A single clip can leave Iran, be checked by journalists from other countries, and then come back in with a stronger sense of trustworthiness.
The leaders of Iran are aware of all of this. It also has a hard limit that wasn’t there in the past: most of the country is online.
DataReportal said that, in early 2025, there would be 73.2 million internet users in Iran, which is about 79.6% of the population. A modern Iranian crackdown tries to stop protests from being seen while also stopping daily business from falling apart.
It looks like selective throttling, selective arrests, and selective fear are needed to find that balance. People from outside the group got involved, and they use social media to do it.
A CBS report said that posts from the US State Department’s Farsi-language account showed concern over the arrests and threats against peaceful protesters and asked the Islamic Republic to respect the rights of Iranians.
There is a kind of strategic restraint in this approach. It shows that you care and are there for them without promising to help.
Israel’s shadow was also close by. The same CBS report said that Israel’s Mossad sent a message through a Persian-language account telling people to go out together. That’s information warfare right in front of your eyes. It gives people hope and gives the government a good reason to talk about foreign plots.
In this case, Israel’s own political choices are also important. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hasn’t said much in public about the protests. Activists watching from afar, including Iranians who post fantasies about Israeli jets and foreign rescue, may find that silence frustrating. That silence also stops Tehran from getting a gift-wrapped story about how Zionists planned things.
Every Israeli leader learns the same thing about Iran: Tehran uses comments from other countries to its advantage. Tehran calls dissent “sabotage.” Tehran uses “foreign hands” to split the street and justify repression.
Still, Washington’s social media stance this week seems smart. It meets Iranians where they spend time online.
Next week, Damavand will still be above Tehran. The bigger contest is about time and story, and I think the regime’s advantage is exaggerated. Tehran has batons, prisons, and the ability to turn off the internet in certain areas, but it is losing the only resource it can’t take by force: people’s beliefs.
I hope this is the beginning of the end. Damavand trending shows that the public has gone from being scared to judging, and that change is hard to undo. The West has a part to play here, and it starts with something real, not just moral support.
“Take real action to make sure the people have global support and can get online,” said one tweet. I agree with the order of importance. Access is the way that public life works in Western societies.
Regimes stay in power by breaking up continuity, while movements stay in power by keeping it going. Legitimacy goes to the side that can keep a shared record alive long enough for the country to see itself in it.