The file photo shows a view of the Iranian Foreign Ministry building in Tehran.
Irans Ministry of Foreign Affairs says a recent decision by the administration of US President Donald Trump to block the domains of Iranian news outlets is in "stark infringement" of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and freedom of expression.
In a twitter post on Sunday, the Iranian ministry "strongly" condemned the US Treasury Departments Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) move as an effort to muzzle free speech.
"The [US] regimes act as silencer to alternative ideas reduces America to the major violator of the rules-based Intl. order," it added.
The tweet came a day after managing director of the Iranian state-run newspaper "Iran" said the OFAC has, in an arbitrary move, blocked and seized the official domain name of the paper.
Mahdi Shafiei added that legal efforts are underway to unblock and take back the domain "iran-newspaper.com" and said the newspapers online version will be available via "irannewspaper.ir".
The US government says "it has the right to seize any .com, .net and .org domain name because the companies that have the contracts to administer them are based on United States soil," a US Homeland Security official said in 2012.
In January 2020, the website of Irans Fars News Agency was also blocked upon the US Treasurys order.
The news agency said that it had received an email from the server company, which explicitly said that the blockage is due to an order by the OFAC and its inclusion in the list of Specially Designated Nationals (SDN).
Previously, Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter targeted Iranian accounts, including those belonging to broadcasters.
In December 2019, Google blocked access to Press TV and Hispan TVs official YouTube accounts without any prior notice.
SOURCE: PRESS TV
LINK: https://www.ansarpress.com/english/16457
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