Iran is imposing increasingly stringent restrictions on internet access, albeit on the verge of a full shutdown, in an apparent attempt to limit the sharing of footage of protests that have erupted across the country, activists accuse.

Activists and Persian-language TV channels outside Iran have noted a drop in the release of cellphone footage of the protests, almost two weeks after the movement that erupted after Mahsa Amini’s death began.

Authorities have already restricted access to Instagram and WhatsApp — the last unfiltered social media services to date — and have now cracked down on apps like the Google Play Store and Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) that try to circumvent local access restrictions .

“It’s still not an internet shutdown, and it’s hard to even describe what they’re doing to the network as ‘shutdowns.’ Perhaps the best simple term for it is extreme throttling,” said Iranian researcher for the Article 19 freedom of expression group Mahsa Alimardani.

“But the disruptions are severe,” she told AFP, saying the disruptions peaked from late afternoon to midnight, when most of the protests take place.

The restrictions still fall short of the total shutdown seen in November 2019, when at least 321 people died in less than a week’s crackdown on protests, according to Amnesty International.

Videos of protests and alleged abuses by the authorities are still being shared on social media channels, but not at the same volume as when the protests first erupted after the death of Amini, who was arrested by the vice squad.

“The authorities seem to have learned how dangerous this is for their economy or public relations in general,” commented Alimardani.

Norway-based Iran Human Rights (IHR), which says 76 people have been killed in the raid so far, said internet access had been either “severely disrupted or completely cut off” in recent days.

“Internet disruptions continue to cause delays in reporting” deaths in the protests, she warned.

The Paris-based organization Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said: “Twelve days into the protests, the internet is still going down daily across the country.”

In response, social media giants have tried to offer help to the Iranians, the United States has even agreed sanctions relief for some software, and tycoon Elon Musk has offered his Starlink satellite internet network.

But how much such measures can help, especially in the short term, remains unclear.

“Internet outages are happening more frequently around the world, including this week in parts of Iran,” Google said in a statement on Twitter, saying its teams are “working to make our tools widely available” after US sanctions were eased.

“We hope that in some way these changes will help people safely access information at this important time,” she added.

Iranians have long used VPNs to access websites blocked in Iran — even government officials, including the foreign minister, have Twitter accounts despite the network being blocked in the country.

But Alimardani described using and accessing VPNs as a “hit and miss” for Iranians at the moment with the Google Play Store ban, a major blow when most Iranians use Android phones with their Google operating systems.

“This is a massive hurdle to downloading secure and new VPNs that work,” she said.