Iran has launched its acknowledge video-sharing website to emulate against Google's popular YouTube whose content is deemed inappropriate by the Islamic regime, the country television reported on Sunday.
The website called 'Mehr', meaning imagination in Farsi, aims to
attract Persian-speaking users and also promote Iranian refinement, according to its About Us page.
"From now on, condition can upload their brief films on the website and access (IRIB) produced material," said IRIB deputy preponderant Lotfollah Siahkali.
A Facebook page dedicated to Mehr is providing links to some of its content, including music clips produced in Iran.
Iran has consistently censored YouTube since mid-2009, in the wake of the disputed elections that returned President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power.
It has besides been trying to aim its population accessing a number of foreign websites authorities mark as undermining the Islamic regime, including popular social networking sites Facebook and Twitter, as hale as the online pages of many Western media outlets, blogs, and pornographic hubs.
The United States accuses Iran of seeking to utensil an "electronic curtain" to cut its citizens off from the world. It has imposed sanctions on the regime involved in the censorship.
The announcement came amid first steps by the Islamic republic to establish a walled-off national intranet lonely from the worldwide Internet.
Iran is working upon rolling out its national intranet that it says will be neat of un-Islamic content. Authorities allegation the "National Internet" would not cut access to the Internet.
Many web users in Iran -- half of whose 75-million stalwart population is connected -- are used to getting around the censorship through the usage of software known as a Virtual Private Network (VPN), whose sale is illegal in Iran.
Believing that the ups-and-downs in Germany’s attitude towards Iran warrant sustained monitoring, we continue to spill ink on the subject – here, again. Berlin is just too important to the crisis with Tehran for the usual hit-and-run coverage.
So let’s start with some good news (well, it’s bad news – but at least there was a ‘good’ official response from Germany!) from the Berlinale film festival, which Iranian director Jafar Panahi was unable to attend being stuck in Tehran under house arrest.
“At the opening ceremony, German cultural minister Bernd Neumann called on Tehran to lift Panahi’s house arrest and allow him to travel to Berlin.”
Even Chancellor Merkel’s spokesman got involved when he
“Urged the Iranian government to allow Panahi to travel to Berlin to present “Closed Curtain,” saying that freedom for artists is a question of human rights.”
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