There are conflicting stories coming out of Iran regarding the alleged request made by Iranian prosecutors for Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to appear in person as a witness in an invasion of privacy case against Facebook-owned apps Instagram and WhatsApp. Instagram is a popular photo-sharing service (bought by Facebook in April 2012 for $1 billion in cash and stock), while WhatsApp (acquired by Facebook in February 2014 in a $16 billion cash and stock deal) is a messaging app.
Motivation for the action by the Iranian courts appears to be mostly ideological, since not only is Facebook blocked in Iran to all but some government officials, both apps are inaccessible within Iran as well. The courts are basing their case on invasion of privacy statutes, but it is unclear whether any non-government sourced complaints were the genesis of the case. It appears to have begun when a judge in southern Iran ordered Zuckerberg to appear in court to respond to "complaints by individuals" about the apps' violation of their privacy.
What's problematic about this case is that both apps are blocked in Iran (although sporadic access is apparently possible at times), as is Facebook. Also, Iran and the U.S. have no extradition treaty through which Zuckerberg could be compelled to visit the Islamic Republic.
Even stranger is that Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and several officials do have their own Facebook pages, created in an attempt to soften the image of Iran's censorship issues to the rest of the world. In theory, then, Iranian citizens who cannot access Facebook would not be able to view their own leaders' pages from within the country.
Rouhani is, to this point, more moderate than his predecessors and seems to be making an honest effort to make Iran more warm and fuzzy to the world, if not quite yet for his own people.
"We should see the cyber world as an opportunity," Rouhani said last week, according to Iran's official IRNA news agency. "Why are we so shaky? Why don't we trust our youth?"
There are still plenty of hardliners in Iran, though, and there seems to be a back-and-forth battle between the moderates in the government and stricter judges and clerics. As a result, the banned-or-not status of social media sites and apps remains in flux.
One example of an ideologically driven ban on Western-sourced apps can be found in this curious statement from a minister who implicates WhatsApp mostly because it is owned by "Zionist" Zuckerberg.
"The reason for this is the adoption of WhatsApp by the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who is an American Zionist," said Abdolsamad Khorramabadi, secretary of - wait for it - the Committee for Determining Criminal Web Content.
