State news on Telegram: Framing anti-regime protests and managing visibility on IRNA's Turkish channel

This article examines how the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) represented the 2025–2026 anti-regime protests through its Turkish-language Telegram channel (@irna_tr), an external-facing service oriented towards a Turkish-speaking transnational audience. The study uses a two-layer design: descriptive mapping of the complete 216-post feed from 27 December 2025 to 27 January 2026 and a van Dijk-informed critical discourse analysis (CDA) of the final 29-post protest-related corpus. The findings show a temporal trajectory from qualified acknowledgement of grievance to securitisation and externalisation, followed by containment and institutional-capacity framing. Official voices and institutional visual repertoires remained central throughout. At the feed level, posting activity contracted during the internet blackout and partially recovered afterwards, while native full-text posting became markedly more prominent. This format change was progressive and coincided with the blackout; the design does not permit causal attribution of the change to either the blackout or Telegram's affordances. The article contributes to research on platformed state communication by showing how framing, source authority, visual selection, posting rhythm, and post form were combined to organise crisis visibility within a sequential public feed.