Filtering of the internet in Iran

During the past week, a question by an Iranian user from an Afghan user in Twitter becomes viral. The question was about the filtering of the internet and censorship in Afghanistan. 

The answer of the Afghan user was kind of shocking for so many of the Iranian people. He replied: We don't have any kind of cencorship and cultural oppression by the government. The only problem we are dealing with is the tradition that rooted in radical islamic believes. This was shocking for the Iranians because they've always been frightened from becoming like Iraq or Afghanistan by the government or its related Medias. In Iran, so many websites, including news websites, those one related to fashion and design, educational websites and so many other topics have been banned by the government. 

Consequently, when an Iranian user hearing that for instance the president of turkey is going to demand social networks like Twitter or Facebook to open an office in turkey so the government can have a closer eye over the Turkish users activities in these platforms, it's still sounds better than iran, due to this fact that there is no famous western neither Chinese company in the field of internet whom they have an office in Iran. There was a quote from Mr. Hasan Rouhani which becomes famous among the Iranian people. He said once in a public speech that he gave orderbto his Minister of communication to not pressing the filtering button in any circumstances. 

But the experience of the Iranian people was completely different: since 2013, which the rate of the internet users in Iran reached to the number of 46 milion till today, the Islamic parlement of Iran, alongside with the ministry of communication and the department of judiciary working together harmoniously to Bann the access of the Iranian users to so many websites, applications and online services. The paradoxical aspect of this filtering is that some persons and institutions which are directly related to the government selling the VPN to the regular users. 

Twitter for instance is one of the social networks which has been filtered in Iran but most of the Iranian govereners have an account on this platform and sharing their political thoughts and views on this website, yet the regular users have to use VPN to have access to this platform! When a website is filtered in Iran, if you type the address in the address bar, you will automatically reach to a page that shows you a list of suggested websites that the government find them appropriate by their standards. 

These websites as well related to the government so when you automatically singing to them, the rate of that mentioned website increases in the search engines due to its be fake views and they can simply earn huge amounts of money by advertisement. Sometimes this filtering is permanent and in some occasions it's temporarily. For instance in 2011, Gmail, Yahoo and the https protocol have been filtered for a period of time which and it caused a serious crisis for many persons and institutions in Iran. 

 There is not much difference between the three Iranian governments (Mohamad khatami, Mahmoud ahmadinejad and Hassan Rouhani) in the term of their policy to filtering the internet. Mohamad khatami took part in a conference in Tunisia about the freedom of access to information and in that conference, he basically denied the filtering of internet in Iran. 

Ahmadinejad did the same during the Iranian protests in 2010 and Hassan Rouhani, besides extending the filtering shut down the entire internet for about ten days during the people's protest in 2018 so the internet users only had access to those websites that hosted by the servers located inside Iran. A project that used to call as national internet.