Now look at this piece - Iran has recently initiated a policy of selected censorship called 'smart filtering' and has developed an application which would in effect weed out undesirable materials on websites without banning an entire website as such. The country has been facing the influx of undesirable contents over the net for sometime in the past.
Its endeavour to put a ban was not effective enough, as the some of its net surfers could devise applications to bye-pass the control. For instance, social platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were routinely bypassed by Iranian technological professionals because most of them used VPN - virtual private networks. With the new system in place, the Iranian Government has very selectively put in motion a technique that could censor out all those contents which went beyond the Government’s interpretation of offending contents. The course of action appears to follow President Hassan Rouhani's decree to loosen some social restrictions. It is however not clear yet whether it would mean greater Internet freedom.
|
|
|
Communications Minister Mahmoud Vaezi, according to official news agency IRNA, announced that the smart filtering plan is implemented only on one social network in its pilot study phase. This process will increasingly continue until the plan is implemented on all the networks. Vaezi also said: ‘Implementing the smart filtering plan, we are trying to block the criminal and unethical contents of the Internet sites, while the public will be able to use the general contents of those sites’.
