Iranian authorities have shut down the Ashkan News website after five years of operation. Simultaneously, the Telegram channel of Mansour Iranpour, a social journalist, was closed by Iran’s cyber police, and Marzieh Hosseini, an economic journalist, was compelled to delete her tweet from her account on X at the request of the cyber police.
According to a report received by DeFFI, the “Working Group for Determining Instances of Criminal Content” in Iran filtered the Ashkan News website on Tuesday, February 25, 2025, without any prior notice. This extralegal action occurred while there is still no information available regarding the reasons for the filtering of this media outlet. Furthermore, no notification or judicial order was issued against Ashkan News in this regard.
In continuation of the restrictions on the activities of Iranian journalists on social media, Marzieh Hosseini was summoned to the “Cyber Police of Iran” (FATA) and was forced to delete her critical tweet about the Supreme Council of Free Trade-Industrial Zones of Iran.
Just a few days earlier, the Public and Revolutionary Prosecutor’s Office of Kerman sentenced Mansour Iranpour, a journalist from Jiroft, to three months of prohibition from using social media. Concurrently, the accounts of this journalist on social media platforms were also blocked.
Blocking journalists’ pages on social media and imposing restrictions on them on these platforms is a frequent pattern in the suppression of free information in Iran. According to the annual report from the Defending Free Flow Of Information Organization (DeFFI), in 2024, judicial and security bodies of the Islamic Republic unlawfully disconnected the SIM cards of several journalists and political activists due to their reporting on various events or the publication of critical posts on social media—without any judicial order. At the same time, several journalists and media activists were pressured by security and judicial authorities to delete their posts on social media; these extralegal actions illustrate the expanding patterns of repression against free information flow in Iran.