Amin Sabeti

After June 12, 2009, the executive organizations, which were in charge of monitoring and filtering, went through many considerable changes and set up new policies to tighten up filtering in Iran. Along with the tightening up of websites and domestic blogs, a large number of pro-government blogs called “officers of soft war” in the Islamic Revolution front were excluded from this sphere.

However, in the late March 2010, which is the New Year for Iranians, the changes in policies took more evident trends. Some of the unprecedented activities as such were filtering of WordPress and Blogfa. According to the latest statistics, these two blog services cover approximately 1,300,000 Persian blogs. Practically, more dramatic decline will occur in the number of materials produced in Persian blogosphere, which means a more isolation of Persian blogosphere and bloggers.

WordPress Filtered!

Some short while before June 13, 2009, on Saturday, the Persian section of WordPress was filtered. Yet, in the evening of June 13, 2009, WordPress blog services alongside all blogs included in the subcategory were filtered. Filtering that was called a system error filtering in the very beginning turned out to be an intentional act performed by the expediency committee of filtering. Following that, there was a profound shock inflicted upon Iranian bloggers community. That is, the protests were not made by freelance bloggers or those against the government, but pro-government bloggers, too, opposed to such acts.

Blog News in a news report entitled “A Punishment for Both the Wrongdoers and the Innocents” criticized having WordPress blog services filtered and called this action a violation of the rules on the part of blocking websites and blogs. Similarly, many users in social networks, such as Twitter and Friendfeed, criticized this event and stated that having the WordPress filtered means that the time for blogging has come to an end in Iran.

The filtering of WordPress did not only leave an effect on the servers of blog services, but it did on the blogs which were on the personal hosts supported by WordPress, as well. The blogs which used WordPress to publish their texts benefitted from a Plugging named “WordPress.com Stats” that was supported by WordPress along with a loading bar representing a smiling face. This helped the website owners keep track of the number of visits to the sites. However, when WordPress was filtered, the smiling face did not work to load the number of those users who did not take advantage of Proxies or VPN to enter the blogs. Thus, those visits were not recorded.

And Then Blogfa Filtered!

It was just a week after WordPress blogging service had been filtered –June 20—that Blogfa blog service which was working inside the country and under the regulations of Islamic Republic of Iran was filtered for 24 hours. It was the second shock that came to bloggers and received a wide spectrum of criticisms and reactions. Blogfa, being listed as one of the helpful links on the filtering page, was filtered by the decision made by the expediency committee of filtering. This prompted many bloggers to protest against the impropriety of filtering policies once again in Iran.

However, during the time when Blogfa’s filtering was being fixed, there was much sarcasm and vitriolic exchanges going on between the pro-government—or, say, committed—bloggers and the administrators of the blog services, which can be named as one of the main reasons of filtering Blogfa.

The obliteration and blocking of some pro-government blogs by Ali Reza Shirazi, the administrator of Blogfa, stimulated a set of attacks to this group of the bloggers. The complication was even aggravated more when some news agencies, like hard-liners’ Fars News Agency , criticized Ali Reza Shirazi’s procedure. They called the blocked blogs—those pro-government blogs or The Blogs committed to Islamic Republic—a leverage to the soft war of Iran in Cyberspace. However, on June 21, 2009, after the filtering had been removed, Blogfa published a notice indicating that the filtering of Blogfa was a system error and that it had nothing important to do with other issues.

The Consequences of Filtering Blogging Services

According to the statistics daily updated by WordPress, there are 260,000 blogs which contain 300,000 posts available in the Persian section. Based on these statistics by Blogfa in 2007, almost one million and thirty five thousand blogs have been registered on which approximately nine million and six hundred thousand texts have been published. In addition, in regard to the latest statistics from the WordPress, there have been two hundred million posts published on this blog so far.

With having these two services filtered now, nearly 210 million posts will be removed from the access of Iranian users within the country. Meanwhile, a large number of users inside Iran suffer from accessing some information due to the sanctions set forth from some US companies, such as, Google and Microsoft. As a result of this, a much smaller domain of data will be accessed by the Iranian users.

Yet, the most important matter to note about the filtering of blog services is that all these strict measures will exert increasingly destructive effects on the blogging processes in Iran that can be metaphorically referred to as an ‘apoplexy’ to the Persian Blogosphere. This is an apoplexy that brings a dramatic reduction in the blogging rate in Iran. This also brings a severe frustration to all those professional bloggers—who had allocated much of their time creating blogs with topical subjects and countless visitors—making them quit blogging. In the long run, this event will pose severely destructive effects to the Persian contents and will reduce the production of posts and contents to a large extent.

In an interview with FAVA News in 2007, Hossein Mazidi, an IT blogger, spoke about such destructive effects of filtering to services like WordPress and Blogger. “The filtering of blog services may apparently seem to be to the benefit of domestic services, but the fact is that losing strong rivals means losing the desire to make progress and the filtering of WordPress and Blogger will in the end bring a great loss to all Persian Internet sites”, he said.

Those in charge of filtering do not hold a proper attitude toward blog services, and blogging as a whole, as they consider blogging a cyber war. To win this war, they think, the best way is filtering and taking strict measures, while filtering is just passing the buck or ducking the issue to which all those measures will be of no use in the long run. In the mean time, the filtering of Blogger and WordPress services, which have simple and easy to use structures, were highly taken into consideration by many Iranian bloggers. According to the statistics released by Alexa, Iran has ranked the 10^th in sending the texts and contents to the WordPress and it is one of the top 15 most visited websites by many Iranians.

کلیدواژه ها: Access blocked in Iran, Blogfa, Censorship in Iran, Circumvention, Filtering, Internet Freedom, Persian Blogosphere, WordPress