Pavel Durov, founder of the popular messaging service Telegram, accused Iran’s Ministry of Communications of requesting to access user’s data and censoring some specific contents on Telegram. The request was reportedly sent via email but Pavel rejected the request. He suggested the recent disturbances on Telegram is caused by this rejection.
Meanwhile, Telegram’s CEO didn’t provide any evidence that he received such a request. He just noted that the Ministry of Communications and Telecommunication Infrastructure requested this by email. An official from the Ministry of Communications, without any response to this claim, said that there was no censorship regarding Telegram.
Pavel Durov said telegram was completely blocked for 2 hours few days ago and it was blocked between 30 to 50 percent in the past week. “Now the network has no problem in Iran” he later added.
In response to users’ questions as to whether the requests was caused by Telegram’s robots publishing pornographic content, “The issue was not raised because these kind of robots have been blocked by Telegram” Pavel Durov replied . He also said making Telegram obsolete by causing these disturbances is the path officials are taking at the Ministry of Communications.
In the past few days Telegram witnessed so many disturbances while it’s become much more popular in Iran with the launch of channels and robots.
At the same time the founder of the telegram said they are working on a P2P service that makes the network unblockable, but it will take time.
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