The Iranian government has reportedly unblocked access to social media websites like Facebook and Twitter on 16 September 2013, after four years of censorship, Reuters reports. However, no official statement from the Iranian government on the loosening of restrictions has been published thus far.
As previously reported by TeleGeography’s CommsUpdate, in January 2013 the government of Iran confirmed that it was working on the development of new smart filtering software which would enable internet users in the country to gain limited access to currently banned social networking sites. Police chief Esmaeil Ahmadi Moghadam said at the time: ‘Smart control of social networks is better than filtering them completely.’ The government introduced a national intranet service which contains only approved content in the summer of 2009, while the conventional world wide web was heavily restricted to remove content which was considered as ‘un-Islamic’.