The Iranian government has discovered that almost three quarters of the country’s youth is accessing blocked websites.
Iran Unblockers More Popular Than Expected
The government of Iran recently ordered research done on unblocking software use in the country. The Ministry of Sport and Young People conducted to study among the youth of Iran to discover how many of them have accessed illegal websites by way of banned software. They found and reported last Monday that about 70% are using banned software like VPN services to open websites. This percentage comes from studying 15,000 Iranian youth from ages 15 to 29. An interesting statistic is that only 67.4 of those surveyed use the Internet at all. This makes the overall result of VPN use even higher for those who have Internet access.
Just a day before the release of this report, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani announced that he feared the controls that the government had put in place were not only ineffectual but actually more damaging to their cause. Many websites have been blocked by order of the government in Iran for political and religious reasons. The president’s statement shows that the use of VPNs and other illegal tools is known to the government. But they did not expect that so many of their youth had access to such tools and were using them to defy government orders.
According to the research team, proxies are in wide use by the youth of Iran for the purpose of beating censorship to reach banned websites. VPNs are banned in Iran because they have the power to defeat online content filtering practices. But it seems that the youth want to access sites like YouTube, Twitter Facebook, and other chat services and entertainment sites much more than they care for government policies. Only ten percent of the group used the Internet for educational research. The government says that it wants to protect the youth from immoral content, but the youth want to make their own choices.
