Telegram-founder ignores Iranian regime's censorship requests
5:06 PM
Telegram, a
messenger service with its servers based in the Netherlands, has revealed some
of the dirty tricks of the Iranian regime. Pavel Durov, founder of Russia’s
most popular social networking site, Vkontakte, said on Twitter that Iran’s
Ministry of Information and Communication demanded that the app would provide
the ministry with “spying and censorship rules”. Durov decided to ignore this
request, after which the regime put a blockage on the app traffic, which took
the app out of order for a full 2 hours. Nevertheless, on the 20th
of October Durov tweeted: “Iranian officials want to use Telegram to spy on
their citizens. We cannot and will not help them with that”.
Image: Twitter.com
The head of
the public relations office of Iran’s Communications Ministry, Mohammad Reza
Farneghizad, claims to not be responsible for the blockage of the app. However,
this is hard to believe since the ministry made it clear in the past that
measures would be taken against app developers that would not help the regime
with its censorship practices. RFERL states the following: “Iranian officials said earlier this year
that the country could allow Internet giants to offer their services if they
respected Iran's "cultural rules and policies," and that the Islamic
republic did not "tolerate" social-networking sites that allow the
sharing of "immoral content."
Durov is
known for ignoring similar requests of the Russian government in the past. His
app Telegram has become very popular in Iran, mostly due to the believe that it
is a safe platform, which allows citizens to have political discussions and to share political satire.
A measure
that the regime has taken in the past is putting parasites on an app, making it
so slow that it becomes unusable. This happened with for example Viber, and they
will certainly try to do the same with Telegram. With this view ahead of them,
citizens are already looking for a good alternative to Telegram. This being said,
the messenger app IMO seems to become more popular too.
More about this?
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