Iran Takes Aim at Google, Wikipedia in Latest Internet Censorship Effort

Image: Mashable Composite. Wikimedia Commons

By Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai2014-05-16 15:15:49 -0400

Google and Wikipedia appear to be the latest victims of Iran's online censorship efforts, just two days after the Iranian government repeated once again that it's planning to loosen its grip on the Internet.

Iran has reportedly blocked access to another Google service, the hosting platform Google Sites, and censored at least two sensitive Wikipedia pages in Farsi in the last couple of days. It's unclear at this point if these blocks are government mandated, but if they are, activists think they would expose the Iranian government's double-sided stance on Internet freedom.

Ever since President Hassan Rouhani was elected last year, his government has pledged to open up to the Internet, while, at the same time, it has steadily censored various services and websites, and even jailed 16 tech bloggers. Twitter and Facebook also still remain blocked in Iran, even though Rouhani, as well as other members of the government, routinely use them.

On Wednesday, Iran announced that it was planning to loosen Internet censorship by using so-called "smart filters," which would allow the government to block only specific "depraved and immoral" websites and leave others untouched, according to Communications Minister Mahmoud Vaezi.

Iran has a long history of blocking Wikipedia sites, as previous research has shown, but these latest blocks, activists warn, seem to indicate that the future is more of the same, rather than more freedom.

"The fact that pages on Wikipedia are now being censored is a troubling harbinger of a tighter hold on access to information, as opposed to the notion that these new technologies will allow for 'looser censorship,'" Mahsa Alimardani, an Iranian Internet researcher based in Toronto, told Mashable.

On Friday, Nariman Gharib, an Iranian researcher based in London reported that the Wikipedia pages about the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the one about the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran were inaccessible within Iran.

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Iran Takes Aim at Google, Wikipedia in Latest Internet Censorship Effort