After the increasing demand for it ... Iran bans the application of "Signal"
This measure indicates the authorities' concerns in Tehran that Signal will become a tool to organize protests and express opposing views, as happened with Telegram.
The Iranian authorities have removed the encrypted "Signal" messaging app from local app stores after the country's supervisory "blocking committee" deemed it "of criminal content."
Iranian media reported that users in Iran, when trying to install the application, received a message stating that "Signal" had been removed "by order of the criminal content designation team in the censorship committee", which is responsible for censoring the Internet.
The committee did not make a public decision on deleting "Signal", while the application is witnessing a strong demand from users around the world after WhatsApp updated the privacy policy, which preserves the right to share user data with the parent company "Facebook".
God’s soul is in court
Although Iran has blocked social media sites and tens of thousands of websites, the country's top officials, including the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, use Twitter.
And Mohammad Reza Tuyserkani, the representative of the Iranian guide in the Basij militia affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards, announced last week that 150 thousand students of the religious seminary in the Basij have been employed to work on communication sites, especially to counter active opposition accounts against the ruling regime in Iran.
Elements of the Basij (Archives)
Hardliners in Iran are constantly calling for the banning of social media and messaging applications and replacing them with internal applications with the aim of suppressing freedom of expression and impeding the organization of protests, according to human rights organizations.
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It is noteworthy that in November 2019, the authorities completely cut off the Internet in Iran, by order of the intelligence and security services, during the suppression of the protests that swept across all provinces, which were controlled after 1500 demonstrators were killed, more than 10 thousand were arrested and thousands were injured.
Last December, a recent study conducted by the magazine "National Security" affiliated to the National Defense University of Iran addressed the views of managers and senior experts of the Iranian intelligence and security services on social media, who identified 15 impacts of these methods on national security, 13 of which were described as "negative."
The study was based on the opinions of senior security directors in the office of the Iranian Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, and officials of the Supreme National Security Council, the Ministry of Intelligence, the Revolutionary Guard, and many other intelligence and security agencies. The study concluded that "the increasing spread of social networks increases social harm and is one of the most important threats to Iranian national security."