A court in the Fars province of Iran allegedly ordered Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg to answer complaints of its citizens that the company’s apps breached privacy policies, but an Iranian prosecutor says the widely circulated news on this is a total lie.
Various media outlets reported Tuesday that Zuckerberg was summoned by the local Iranian court over allegations of privacy violations in apps owned by Facebook, particularly Instagram and WhatsApp. Specific violations were not mentioned though.
"According to the court's ruling, the Zionist director of the company of Facebook, or his official attorney must appear in court to defend himself and pay for possible losses," Iranian Internet official Ruhollah Momen-Nasab says, as quoted by ISNA state news agency and then reported by news agencies such as Reuters.
Ali Alqasimehr, prosecutor of Shiraz General and Revolutionary Courts, affirms that there are complaints from individuals against Facebook for the publication of certain unethical images and presence of some controversial films in the social network website, but says Zuckerberg being summoned to Fars court is an utter lie. He also says there’s no such thing as filtering of Instagram and WhatsApp software by Shirazi judge, as reported earlier.
With WhatsApp’s case, it was reported that the Committee for Determining Criminal Web Content particularly cited the reason as “the adoption of WhatsApp by the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who is an American Zionist,” which again referred to the founder’s Jewish background.
“The individuals’ complaints against the Facebook and the executive managers of WhatsApp and the Instagram software are under survey at two branches of Shiraz courts of justice, allocated to internet crimes,” Alqasimehr clarifies to the Islamic Republic News Agency.
The earlier reports also mentioned that the move was part of the continued protests of some conservative Iranian officials against the power and influence of the Internet. Iranian authorities were also said to be routinely blocking access to social media networks, including Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, as well as mobile apps and other websites deemed un-Islamic or dangerous to the current regime.
Iranian president Hassan Rouhani is one that pushes for further Internet freedom as opposed to the conservative judiciary that seeks for stricter regulations. Rouhani even says that the country should embrace Internet and its opportunities instead of seeing it as threat. In fact, Rouhani and his administration are said to have found a new way through social media to extend to the West as the country discusses its much-debated nuclear program with world leaders.
Conservatives, though, lambast Rouhani for allowing the spread of Western culture in the country.
Further researches say that an official of the Rouhani administration revealed the country would loosen censorship of the Internet through “smart filtering,” which means only sites deemed immoral by the Islamic government would be blocked. The current regime is said to loosen the policies set by former leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who previously and routinely put bloggers in jail and folded up Internet access following the use of social media to arrange a protest in 2009.
Research indicates use of Internet is said to be high in Iran because of the official ban on cultural products of the West. A lot of young Iranians turn to the worldwide web using proxy servers to evade government controls when accessing social media and apps. Top officials, meanwhile, are said to have unrestrained access to social media, such as Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif who is active on Twitter.
