Baku, Azerbaijan, May 23
By Umid Niayesh - Trend:
Number of Iranians who have migrated to Telegram, a mobile social networks application has witnessed a huge boom in recent weeks.
Currently some five million Iranians use Telegram, Iran's ISNA news agency reported May 23.
The huge migration wave came after Iranian users experienced various problems in access to other popular social networks applications, in particular Viber in recent month.
Iranian officials have rejected so far having a hand in the problem. Mahmoud Vaezi, the Islamic Republic's communications and information technology dismissed reports that the ministry has implemented restriction on access to Viber mobile application.
The minister said on May 4 that the recent problems with Viber and Instagram networks are not related to Iran's Internet without unveiling further details.
However Iran's communications and information technology ministry says blocking mobile social networks applications is not on the agenda, it encourages domestic developers to develop such domestic applications to replace with foreign ones.
Meanwhile five million Iranians use Telegram, the most popular domestic communication application, BisPhone has almost 800,000 users.
Unofficial statistics suggest that at least 4.5 to five million of Iranian citizens also use WhatsApp mobile social networks application.
Iran's Culture Minister Ali Jannati earlier said that 9.5 million Iranians use the social app Viber and 4 to 4.5 million use Facebook.
It should be noted that several of world's most popular networks, such as Twitter and Facebook are banned in Iran, while users are still able to access them via proxies. A proxy allows bypassing 'gates' meant to block certain sites.
A survey by Iranian Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports indicates that 69.3 percent of the country's young generation use proxy servers to by-pass the filters and access banned Internet websites.
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