Abolhasan Firuz Abadi, the chairman of Cyber Space High Council reported that Iran has officially demanded to negotiate with Instagram. He told Hamshahri newspaper: “We have asked Instagram to have talks, but nothing has happened yet. The initial emails have been exchanged but no appointment yet.”

He said the high council’s goal in these negotiations is to replace Instagram with a domestic version, and he claimed that the new domestic version has already been developed. He was referring to Lenzor, the social media platform that was developed by the Islamic Republic and in five years has only attracted less than 10000 users.

Referring to the demands for filtering Instagram, Firuz Abadi added: “Many in the religious community have problems with Instagram, and they have an impact and their voices are heard. We cannot ignore them.”

Firuz Abadi also mentioned the letter of six ministers and two congressmen that demanded to unblock Twitter: “I disagree with the ministers who signed the letter to unblock Twitter. Because I believe Twitter is an unstable platform. But I’m not against foreigners using it.”

He continued: “If Twitter wants to work in Iran, they have to store the citizens’ data inside the country and delete all the fake accounts. Not removing most of the supporters of the Islamic Republic and removing a few of the opposition to pretend to be unbiased.”

In Iran, most social media and websites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Telegram, Viber, WordPress, Blogger, Spotify, and much more are blocked by the regime.