Reports indicate that Meta has concealed user lists for accounts geolocated within Iran, a move likely aimed at protecting user security amidst ongoing unrest.
Following earlier reports regarding the removal of the Iranian flag emoji on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), a new development has now been reported concerning Instagram.
Meta’s Security Measure
Milad Nouri, an internet and technology expert, reported via his Telegram channel that Meta (Instagram’s parent company) appears to have implemented a decision to hide the “Followers” and “Following” lists for accounts identified as being located in Iran.
Screenshots released by Nouri regarding his own account lists reveal that while the total count of followers and followings remains visible, the lists themselves are not displayed. Instead, users are greeted with the message: “No users found.”
Corroborating this report, a screenshot of Zoomtek’s own Instagram page sent to our editorial team confirms that the lists for our account have also been obscured, displaying the error message: “Couldn’t load users.”
The Link to Mass Data Scraping
Prior to this development, the “Cloudforce One” account (Cloudflare’s threat operations and research team) posted on X regarding a shift in the surveillance of Iranian Instagram accounts. Cloudflare disclosed that they had detected Iranian user pages being targeted by tools capable of mass scraping follower lists and analyzing user activity.
It is highly probable that Meta disabled the display of followers and following lists for pages with an Iranian location specifically to counter these mass data extraction efforts.
It is important to note that this restriction appears to apply strictly to users whose location is registered as Iran; the follower and following lists of Iranian users with location settings based in other regions continue to be displayed normally.
