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March 5, 2020 10:10 pm

Iran's Answer To the Coronavirus Outbreak: Cut the Internet

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Moments after Iran announced that a top adviser to Iran's Supreme Leader had died as a result of the coronavirus, the government blocked access to the Persian version of Wikipedia. The restrictions remained in place for 24 hours, though an oversight by the government meant that while the desktop version of the site was blocked, the mobile version remained available. Access to the Farsi version of Wikipedia was restored on Tuesday, but social media sites like Twitter and Facebook remain restricted inside the country as of Wednesday, as the government seeks to control the spread of information and keep a grip on the narrative around the increasingly deadly outbreak. Netblocks, a digital rights advocacy group that tracks internet disruptions around the world, said that there has also been widespread internet disruptions at night in certain parts of the country, including Qom, where the outbreak is believed to have originated. Tehran's police force created a "coronavirus defense base" to monitor "misinformation and the spread of fear." So far, the police have already arrested 24 people and a further 118 internet users were "talked to and let go" with warnings. The country also released 54,000 prisoners in an effort to halt the spread of the virus. "The inmates were temporarily allowed out of jail after testing negative for the coronavirus and posting bail," reports Motherboard. "The government is also deploying hundreds of thousands of health workers across the country to stop the deadly outbreak."

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