Iran starts negotiations on Twitter unblocking

Almaty. August 23. Silkroadnews – Iran starts negotiations on Twitter unblocking, Pakistani newspaper “The News International” reported.
“Iran’s new communications minister (Mohammad-Javad Azari Jahromi – Silkroadnews) said on Tuesday that negotiations were underway with Twitter to unblock the service, which has been banned for years despite being used even by the country’s supreme leader”, report says.
It is explained that the micro-blogs platform was banned during the mass protests in 2009, following the allegations of multiple falsifications during re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. As M. Jahromi noted, Twitter has announced it is ready to negotiate to solve the problem.
“Considering the current situation there are grounds for such negotiation and interaction. Twitter is not an immoral environment needing to be blocked”, minister is quoted saying.
It is reported that this week 36-year-old Jahromi became the youngest-ever minister of Iran, born after the 1979 Islamic revolution. His appointment has been criticized by human rights groups because of his involvement in surveillance over citizens during and after mass protests against the regime in 2009. He rejected the criticism meeting with lawmakers this week, saying he was not responsible for surveillance over citizens, and was only in charge of the technical support.
With this, the publication says, Jahromi is seen as a critic of online censorship in Iran, where such platforms as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter remain banned, even though millions of people use them daily through anonymizers. According to him, officials also consider the possibility of unblocking YouTube while still censoring “immoral content” on this video sharing service, and that the pilot project would allow universities to access the site.
It is reported that no immediate response from Twitter or YouTube has yet been received. Jahromi noted that the final decision to unblock the sites rests with the Supreme Council for Cyberspace, which includes representatives of the judiciary.
As the publication reminds, the protests of 2009 were the first time when Twitter and social networks were widely used for organizing protests, later this method was used when a year later the Arab spring broke out.
“At that time and based on remarks made by the director of this network, Iran’s government believed they had interfered in the country’s internal affairs and for this reason Twitter was filtered”, the agency quoted saying by Jahromi, who himself has more than 4,000 subscribers on the micro-blogging platform.