This article examines the ways internet shutdowns, far from entirely eliminating resistance, transform the politics of visibility and resistance in Iran's protest movements, including the January 2026 protests. The paper draws on interdisciplinary sources, including theories of political legitimacy, digital activism, and media studies, to show how authoritarian censorship affects the domestic information sphere by closing off spaces for communication and the flow of protest narratives within Iran. This research shows how the censoring of digital visibility within Iran creates a pivotal moment in which diaspora populations take on the role of mediating, translating, and amplifying information about protests across national borders. It focuses on diaspora-mediated visibility as an act of political participation through which local acts of resistance are transformed into global narratives of resistance against state power. It can also be seen that such processes do not suppress resistance but rather move it, making possible new forms of delegitimization that extend beyond the Iranian state's borders. The article adds to the fields of digital authoritarianism, transnational activism, and politics of visibility by showing how censorship can inadvertently create alternative structures of resistance in authoritarian settings.
Shaghayegh Mohebkhodaee (Fri,) studied this question.