Look who is rockin’ social media in Iran

Facebook is blocked in Iran. So is Twitter. Instagram is partially blocked, since you can target individual pages without blocking the whole site. Surprisingly, the only social media channel available in the country that doesn’t require a VPN to access is Line, the global instant messenger. Its social media feature, coined Timeline, is flourishing in Iran, and that’s interesting news for a bunch of reasons.

On the messenger front, Line lags behind Telegram in Iran, the latest offspring of the Russian Durov brothers. Telegram has somewhere between 50 percent to 60 percent of its user base in Iran, and this happened by chance late last year when the Iranian judiciary ordered Viber, the previous market leader, blocked. Telegram is where most of the herd migrated to but who knows for how long. The IM app is continually criticized as of late for being a festering ground for pornography and a questionable channel of communication for groups like ISIS.