In the wake of the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, a top commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, by the United States in January 2020, Iranians took to social media to express a wide range of responses. In aggregate, these communications reflected the political collectivities and tensions that undergird Iranian society, all the while circumscribed by a domestic surveillance apparatus as well as a global sanctions regime that limit Iranians’ free expression. On the one hand, all Western social media platforms except Instagram are officially blocked by the Iranian government. On the other, usage of these blocked platforms is so widespread that most top government officials including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani actively utilize them. While navigating these idiosyncratic and inconsistent restrictions after the assassination, which came soon after nationwide protests prompted by a spike in fuel costs, Iranians discovered that Instagram had begun removing posts relating to Soleimani’s death and suspending or removing accounts associated with those posts. Despite Instagram’s claims that the decision was motivated by the need to comply with US sanctions policies relating to firms doing business in or with Iran, inconsistent application of sanctions has resulted in disparities in Iranians’ ability to communicate via social media. This paper explores these disparities, including class demarcations and geographic distributions in technology access, in order to shed light on how Iranians navigate practical limitations to free expression in both domestic and international domains; how the application of sanctions law in the as-yet underdeveloped domain of social media serves to exacerbate profound inequities in Iranian society; and how currents of nationalist and anti-imperialist political thought in Iran exist in persistent tension with one another.