WH tells Tehran to unblock soc. media

The Trump administration on Tuesday urged the Iranian government to stop blocking widely used social-media sites like Instagram, insisting the United States has an “obligation not to stand by.”

“They are legitimate avenues for communication,” Undersecretary of State Steve Goldstein declared. “People in Iran should be able to access those sites.”

He called on the Tehran government to “open” blocked sites, including Instagram and the popular messaging app Telegram (as this man shows on his smart phone), which is used by more than half of Iran’s 80 million citizens.

Iranians can get around government filters by using virtual private networks [VPNs], which encrypt traffic, Goldstein added.

Meanwhile, the US will continue communicating with Iranians in Farsi through Facebook and Twitter accounts. Both social-media sites are blocked in Iran, but many citizens still access them through VPNs.

“We want to encourage the protesters to continue to fight for what’s right and to open up Iran,” Goldstein said.

The Iranian government has long used a variety of tactics to censor the country’s Internet, including compelling Internet service providers to filter content.

A 2013 study about Iranian Internet censorship found that half of the 500 most popular sites are censored, and a “large amount of Iran’s traffic passes through a centralized facility,” where it’s filtered.

In 2016, the country rolled out the first phase of its plan to create a national Internet, which many worry will only allow the government to ramp up censorship.

This week, some have called on Google to make counter-censorship apps like Signal available to Iranians. Signal uses Google’s App Engine, which the company has banned in Iran to comply with US sanctions.