One way to assess how capable Mojtaba Khamenei, the leader of the Islamic Republic, really is of exercising power may be not to wait for a new photograph or recording of him, but to look instead at the areas where one would expect the “Supreme Leader” to assert his authority. Cyberspace is one of the best places to look.

The Supreme Council of Cyberspace is no ordinary institution within the Islamic Republic’s power structure. In 2011, Ali Khamenei, the former dictator, personally established it to create, in his own words “a centralized focal point for policymaking and decision making in cyberspace.” One IRGC commander has famously recounted that Ali Khamenei once said that, had he not been the Supreme Leader, he would have wanted to head this body himself.

In the years that followed, some of the Islamic Republic’s most important policies on internet control, the National Information Network, user identification, support for domestic messaging services, and the exercise of “sovereignty” over platforms emerged from this structure. In a sharply worded letter that Khamenei personally sent to then-president Hassan Rouhani after the bloody crackdown of November 2019, he stressed the central role of domestic messaging platforms within the broader architecture of surveillance, communications control, and the National Information Network.

The 2018 resolution on the “Regulation of Social Messaging Platforms” explicitly stated that its goal was to achieve the widespread adoption of domestic messaging platforms while regulating foreign ones. A domestic messenger was defined as a service hosted inside the country and over which the state had the “ability to exercise sovereignty.” The ban on government agencies using foreign messaging platforms also originated in resolutions adopted by this Supreme Council.

Now, something is happening in the opposite direction.

In April this year, President Pezeshkian established the “Special Task Force for the Organization and Governance of Cyberspace” and placed the vice president at its head: Mohammad Reza Aref, who served as minister responsible for this sector in the 1990s, when the ministry was still known as Post, Telegraph and Telephone. The new Task Force was not tasked merely with executive coordination. The president’s decree even referred to the “restructuring of policy making structures,” including the reorganization of the secretariat of the Supreme Council of Cyberspace.

The move was so unusual that more hardline members of the Supreme Council described the creation of the headquarters as an “encroachment on the authority of the Vali-e-Amr (Vicar of Allah)” and as contrary to the decree that established the Supreme Council of Cyberspace. For a period, the Administrative Justice Court also suspended implementation of the decision establishing the Task Force.

But the Special Task Force of Cyberspace survived. And it has now made a decision with significant political implications: on September 6, 2026, it lifted the ban on executive agencies conducting official public communications through non domestic messaging services. Government bodies may now use WhatsApp, Telegram, and other foreign platforms for public information and communications.

This does not, of course, mean the end of the policy of supporting domestic messaging platforms, nor does it abolish all previous restrictions. What matters is the direction of travel.

For years, one of the central principles of internet governance in the Islamic Republic was that communications between citizens and the state should, as far as possible, be transferred into environments where the government could exercise “sovereignty” over the infrastructure, the data, users identities, and the rules governing activity. In practice, it sought backdoor access for surveillance. Now the government itself is allowing its institutions to conduct official communications on platforms that sit precisely outside that model of sovereignty.

It has long been said that under Ali Khamenei’s leadership, Mojtaba, with his father’s approval, played a significant role in the Islamic Republic’s domestic policymaking. There is considerable evidence supporting that assessment. If, six months after becoming leader of the Islamic Republic, Mojtaba Khamenei is alive, conscious, and in possession of the real authority traditionally associated with the Supreme Leader, this development requires an explanation.

Why, in one of the areas for which Ali Khamenei created a dedicated, supra-governmental institution outside the ordinary constitutional framework, is an administration body headed by a Vice President now able to move against one of the most heavily promoted and firmly established policies of the previous era?

The Supreme Council of Cyberspace has not convened for more than a year, with its last meeting held in July 2025. Much of that hiatus coincided with the extraordinary period between the two wars, widespread internet shutdowns, and the intense securitization of the communications environment following the January 2026 massacre.

The more important indicator is what is happening now: decisions are being made through a new channel, and part of the old policy is being rolled back without any visible effective intervention by the new Supreme Leader.

None of this proves that Mojtaba Khamenei is dead or in a vegetative state. But when he has made no independently verifiable public appearance, either in audio or video, for months, and serious questions remain about his capacity to govern the country, the behavior of state institutions becomes more significant. Reuters has reported that despite claims by Islamic Republic officials that he continues to work, his prolonged absence has raised questions about his actual ability to govern.

Perhaps one of the most important clues to answering the question, “Is Mojtaba Khamenei alive?” or, in its lighter formulation, “If Mojtaba is unable to exercise the authority of the Supreme Leader, who is actually running the Islamic Republic?” lies somewhere few people are looking: WhatsApp and Telegram.