October 10-14
A Spanish reporter visiting Tehran to check out Internet censorship concludes that it is a pain in the neck but doesn’t really stop anyone with persistence from getting to content he or she wants to see.
Ana Cardenes, a foreign correspondent with the Spanish news agency EFE, says confronting Internet censorship is “a daily struggle for many Iranians.” But, in the end, she says, “they can access all the online content they wish”—whether that be politics or porn.
It is estimated that Iranian authorities block access to more than 5 million web pages, including popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, but also pornography, religious topics, issues like women’s rights and any media considered hostile to the Islamic Republic
Needless to say, sites of human rights organizations and dissidents are among those blocked.
However, according to the government’s own figures, at least 4 million Iranians have Facebook accounts. Other sources raise that figure to 15 million in a country of 78 million inhabitants.
The most followed Face-book pages in Iran are reported to be those of singer Shadmehr Aghili, a Persian pop singer based in Los Angeles who has almost two million “likes,” the London-based and banned Farsi entertainment channel Manoto TV, and Colombian musical icon Shakira, who is followed by more than 1.5 million Iranians but has no ties to Iran at all.
BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Zara and Gucci are the most-followed brands on social networks.
In the sports category, first place goes to Spanish soccer club FC Barcelona, with 800,000 followers, while Real Madrid comes second with about 700,000 fans.
Millions of Iranians also have accounts on Instagram, and upload videos on Vimeo or YouTube. Even Foreign Minister Mohammad-Javad Zarif has a frequently updated Twitter account, which can claim 200,000 followers.
But all these figures do not mean restrictions are non-existent. Cardenes writes, “The barriers make the simple act of accessing the Internet a considerable headache, while surfing the Web, exchanging programs or downloading files become challenging missions that can only be accomplished by experts who know how to breach the firewall.”
Internet penetration in Iran is generally put at 55 percent, the second-highest in the Middle East, right behind Israel. The government itself estimates that the country has 45 million active Internet users.
A survey recently released by the Ministry of Youth and Sports says that 70 percent of Iranian youth surfing the Internet use anti-filters. “Every week I see a dozen customers to install anti-filters,” a computer engineer who preferred to remain unnamed told Cardenas.
“Six years ago [after the post-election disorders], these problems increased,” the engineer said, explaining that “there are several types of anti-filters, but the most popular ones are the VPN [Virtual Private Network] or proxy technologies,” which connect users to the Internet through servers located outside Iran.
Millions of Iranian computers sport the logos of Psiphon, Freegate, Ultra Soft, Tor or other programs that allow users to navigate the web freely—and undetected.
Cardenas writes, “These programs may remain in use for weeks, sometimes even months, before the authorities manage to locate and block them, prompting users to find another program or an update.”
There are also people who hire foreign companies for specific VPN services, some of which are supported by a US government fund to help IT companies stay ahead of censorship by Iran and other authoritarian regimes.
“Internet censorship is ridiculous. If people want to see pornographic photos or political websites, they will do so without problems,” a young network expert, who also requested to remain anonymous, told Cardenas.
He said he has “many customers who are very religious,” for whom he installs VPN because they consider the government’s practices too restrictive.
Besides of the annoying task of keeping the anti-filters constantly updated, the govern-ment’s censorship can cause many inconveniences for Internet surfers.
For example, the Adobe program (used by many online videos) does not work through a proxy, since it cannot identify the user.
Other problems include installation of legally-licensed software or, for example, the drivers for a newly purchased printer, which cannot be installed correctly.
“Surfing the web has become a game of tag in which huge amounts of time and effort are wasted,” concludes Cardenas. “Rather than actually preventing access, censorship simply complicates the matter a bit.”
In an interview with US National Public Radio (NPR) in New York last month, Foreign Minister Zarif tackled the testy topic of censorship. He said:
“A large segment of Iranian population who are very traditional believe that it is the job of the government, the responsibility of the government, to create social conditions that are safe—that the children, when they go on the Internet, do not face profanity, do not face prostitution, do not face pornography—so that it is the job of the government to create a barrier for them, to create that social security net for them.
“And the debate in Iran on how this can be done is an ongoing debate. It’s far from being settled. It’s clear where I stand on that debate, but I do not, nor does the government, determine the outcome of a domestic, social debate. It’s a social debate that needs to be addressed. Even when we introduced high-speed mobile Internet, there were a lot of objections from more traditional centers in Iran.
“So that’s an ongoing process and I hope at the end of the day, from my perspective as an Iranian citizen, not necessarily as an Iranian official, that one day these platforms will be free.”
