Fazaeli called on the Iranian people to show to Instagram’s parent company Meta that it would pay a price for taking the measure.
He made the comments at a special meeting held as part of programs of the 24th edition of the Iran Media Expo on Wednesday, the final day of the exhibition in Tehran. The meeting examined activity by Khamenei.ir -- the official name of Ayatollah Khamenei’s website and social media accounts -- regarding Operation Al-Aqsa Storm and Meta’s banning of the account on Instagram.
Fazaeli said that attempts by the self-styled advocates of free speech to prevent the spread of Iran’s Supreme Leader’s messages will be useless.
He added that Instagram’s move to block Khamenei.ir account is not unprecedented, and similar measures had previously been taken on the same platform and in other languages, but the ban was removed after a couple of days.
It seems that whenever the authorities of these platforms feel that a message against their policies is being spread, they put aside all their claims and slogans to prevent further spreading of that message through their “digital dictatorship”, he noted.
Banning Khamenei.ir account is "a test for self-styled advocates of freedom of speech”, he said, noting that if an account with a few followers is blocked, there will be a lot of media hype, but the self-styled advocates of free speech make no reaction when an account with five million followers is blocked.
“This is an important test and a clear demonstration of the fact that freedom of speech is a tool in the hands of dictators.”
Meta removed the Persian- and English-language accounts belonging to Ayatollah Khamenei earlier this month following intensified pressure from pro-Israel groups.
The Supreme Leader’s Persian-language account had more than 5.1 million followers and his English-language account had more than 204,000.
3266**4194
Your Comment