censorship

Censorship has a long history in Iran that has interfered with text production, i.e., original writing as well as translation. This phenomenon seems to have marked the borderline between the government and the ‘enlightened’ intellectuals throughout history in Iran. Different governments have delineated ‘redlines’ for authors and translators and dealt with these constructors of culture based on the definitions they set for those ‘redlines’. This historical research aims at exploring and finding out features of these ‘redlines’ as well as the mechanisms and rules of text screening (censorship) throughout Iran’s modern era since the importing of the printing press.

Contesting Cyberspace in China: Online Expression and Authoritarian Resilience by Rongbin Han. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. 336pp., $30.00 (p/b), ISBN 978-0231184755

Globally, Internet censorship is on the rise and Iran has been portrayed as one of the most critical cases. So far, however, no studies have investigated the issue from an inside look. To fill this literature gap, the present paper aims to provide an overview of Internet censorship in Iran, by assessing the Iranian perspective on Internet freedom, different aspects of the subject, as well as the domestic and foreign types of limitations clients face today. This study has shown that Iran’s current filtering policy is a lenient one pursuing Internet development and simultaneously providing protection against potential threats. The Iranian case also includes some global issues such as censorship imposed due to the U.S. sanctions. Specifically, the findings of this study revealed that the range and extent of restrictions imposed on the Iranians’ access to mobile applications by the U.S. are significantly more than those placed by the Iranian filtering regime.