Iran is expected to block the popular messaging app Telegram, following similar measures taken by Russia, after the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, announced he was leaving the service to safeguard the national interest.
Telegram has proved a massive success in Iran, dwarfing the number of people using its global rival WhatsApp, and surpassing Facebook and Twitter, which have both been blocked for a long time in the country.
About 40 million Iranians – almost half of the country’s population – are estimated to be on Telegram, which has also appealed to older generations previously unfamiliar with the use of such social media platforms. In addition to one-to-one or group messaging, it allows users to broadcast posts to large audiences with its channel function.
Khamenei’s office announced on Wednesday that it was shutting down the ayatollah’s Telegram channel in order to safeguard national interests and end what it said was Telegram’s monopoly on the country’s social media.
The announcement also signalled that a nationwide ban on the app was imminent. “This move comes ahead of plans by the authorities to block Telegram and is aimed at supporting domestic social media apps,” read the brief message.
Iran’s vice-president, Eshaq Jahangiri, also announced that he was quitting Telegram. Officials also sent a directive to all civil servants and government departments telling them to stop using Telegram.
Iran has been mulling a ban on Telegram ever since protests over economic grievances at the end of last year took on a political dimension before spreading to up to 80 cities in January. Officials blamed Telegram for providing a platform for protesters to organise rallies.
The country’s technology minister personally reached out to Telegram’s founder, Pavel Durov, at the time, asking him to block channels that he alleged were spreading violence, prompting one such channel – that had been spreading misinformation – to be blocked.
Iranians have shown huge resilience when it comes to the state blocking their access to online services, sites and social platforms. They have mastered anti-filtering software to bypass state restrictions and often migrate in their millions to a new platform when one is blocked. The success of Telegram is partly thanks to Iranians rapidly switching to the messaging service when Viber was blocked.
The news in Iran comes after Russia’s internet watchdog blocked an estimated 16m IP addresses in a massive operation against the banned Telegram messaging app four days after a court ordered the service to be blocked over alleged terrorism concerns.
Source : The Guardian
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