SMALL MEDIA
On the early evening of September 16, Internet users in Iran began to report that they were able to access Facebook and Twitter without having to resort to anti-filtering tools. Although the censorship regime (colloquially known as the Filternet), had been known to fail for brief periods in the past, this time the opening paralleled the development of a political and social environment in which the relaxation of Internet restrictions has begun to feel inevitable. Perceptions of increasing state leniency have been fuelled by such positive developments as the commuting of web developer Saeed Malekpour’s death sentence to life imprisonment.
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