Many WhatsApp accounts with Iranian numbers are disabled, even outside of Iran
twitter.com
twitter.com
---
Original comment:
There's also https://twitter.com/YourAnonCentral/status/15727650099729899... (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32937397, but we merged that thread hither).
It's clear that accounts are having trouble communicating but the various tweets on this seem to have conflicting explanations about who is doing it. Is this known?
Edit: the OP editorialized the title, which is against the site guidelines (please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). We've changed it now to what the tweet actually says—which is agnostic on the above point.
Submitted title was "WhatsApp has disabled communication between accounts from Iran during protests".) Submitters: Please don't do that! It has an enormous impact on threads, as it did here, and usually a very bad one.
It would be really interesting to understand whether Meta is playing an active role in blocking the use of Whatsapp for users with a particular country code, but who are currently outside the affected country (as some trending but unsubstantiated posts on LinkedIn/Twitter allege), or whether it really is that easy for a single government to block the service globally for a subset of its users.
Meta is restricting Iranian phone numbers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32944717 - Sept 2022 (1 comment)
WhatsApp got blocked in Iran but stopped working for Iranians traveling abroad - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32943646 - Sept 2022 (0 comments)
Meta is helping the Islamic Republic in its war against Iranians - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32940404 - Sept 2022 (3 comments)
It's not clear if these have more recent information or not - it looks to me like some are from the same time yesterday but just got posted later.
It's also not clear what's actually happening. Perhaps there's more reliable info somewhere on the web. I agree with you that it would be interesting to know either way, but I guess we have to wait for significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...) before having another big thread about this; otherwise we'd just get a repeat of the current thread.
It's one of the things that makes a corporation international.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/did-twitter-violate-us-sanctions...
Specifically for Iran? I'm not entirely sure if there's restrictions on compliance with general requests.
But the tweet indicates they just disabled accounts with Iranian phone numbers.
(Subject line at time of this comment: "WhatsApp has disabled communication between accounts from Iran during protests")
(… and it was fixed 12 minutes later, thanks dang!)
Local laws change. Facebook’s sociopathic culture has put it at a material disadvantage when it comes to public opinion and merger/regulatory approvals. If that spills into judgement of its employees, it could turn into a recruiting problem.
The moment Meta fails to follow any local law, policimakers all over the world will scratch their heads and think about how that could happen in their own juridictions. There will be consequences.
Moreover, most countries in the world regulate speech in many ways. I don't see why Meta should bear the responsibility of being the global free speech police when local citizens themselves were not keen at fighting this battle.
Meta has a thorough history of selectively following local laws.
> don't see why Meta should bear the responsibility of being the global free speech police
They don't. They have a duty to not undermining American interests overseas. If they need active lawmaking to tell them when they are and are not doing that, Congress will create a permanent regulator for them.