Iran continues to block tens of thousands of websites, especially international news sources and those involving opposition to the regime, ethnic and religious minorities and human rights groups, a new study has found.
The regime also has a complete block on Western social media, including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Flickr.
The findings come in a new ‘Freedom of the Net 2014’ report that surveys 65 governments and their policies regarding the filtering or censoring of online content.
It also looks at the types of electronic surveillance they conduct and how they punish citizens whose online activities they disapprove of.
In reference to Iran, the report said: “The Iranian authorities continued to restrict access to tens of thousands of websites in 2014, particularly those of international news sources, the opposition, ethnic and religious minorities, and human rights groups.
“According to a member of the Committee to Determine Instances of the Criminal Contents (CDICC), an average of 1,500 websites with content considered anti-Islamic are filtered every month.”
The report said that the “censorship remains stable” despite “raised expectations that Rouhani would ease restrictions on online speech.”
A CDICC member had described Facebook as ‘a project of the CIA in an attempt to collect data from individuals around the world’, and branded founder Mark Zuckerberg ‘a leading Zionist’, the report said.
The Iranian government had also blocked access to two of Iran’s most popular instant messaging and communication services – WeChat and Viber. Cryptocat, a tool popular with human rights activists and journalists that allows secure and encrypted chat, was also blocked, showing that the regime is panicked by communication channels it cannot monitor, the study added.
It said: “The Iranian authorities employ a centralized filtering system that can effectively block a website within a few hours across the entire network in Iran.
“Private ISPs are forced to either use the bandwidth provided by the government or route traffic containing site-visit requests through government-issued filtering boxes developed by software companies inside Iran. The filtering boxes search for banned text strings—either keywords or domain names—in the URL requests submitted by users, and block access accordingly.
“The Iranian government has intensified its fight against the use of circumvention tools. The use of such tools is considered to be illegal, although many ignore this. According to the most recent statistics, 45 percent of Iranian users utilize VPNs to bypass censorship, and 41 percent use other circumvention methods to access blocked content.”