Iranian President Hassan Rowhani has urged his cabinet to create their own Facebook pages in an attempt to make his presidency more accountable and accessible than his predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s administration, the Associated Press reports.
However, Iranian authorities continue to try to block the public from social media sites.
The AP says the new initiative "exposes internal tensions among Iran's leadership over whether the Internet is ultimately a force to be expanded or best kept tightly controlled."
Some newspapers Monday speculated that Rouhani's push for government Facebook accounts might signal an easing of some of the Internet barriers.
Not so, replied Iran's chief Internet overseer. Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejehei, head of the supervisory board on Internet content, said "it is not the time for lifting filters" on Facebook and other sites. […]
Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a religious decree last year that called Facebook permissible if it was not used for "corrupting" purposes. Yet Khameni also has denounced the Internet as the vanguard of a Western cultural invasion — what he calls "Westoxification" — that hardliners believe undermines Islamic values.
