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Application Telegram apologizes to Iran for stickers: Communications min.

Friday, 14 August 2015 11:52 AM [ Last Update: Friday, 14 August 2015 5:31 PM ]

Iranian Minister of Communications and Information Technology Mahmoud Va’ezi

An Iranian minister says the entity responsible for running the instant messaging software Telegram has apologized to Iran for a series of unethical “stickers” that were recently made available to Iranian users.

Minister of Communications and Information Technology Mahmoud Va’ezi said late Thursday that Telegram’s management entity, in an e-mail sent to the ministry under his watch, had made a commitment to continue its activities in compliance with the Islamic Republic’s laws and to remove the unethical stickers from the software, IRNA reported Friday.

The Iranian users of Telegram had recently noticed and were repulsed by a series of explicit stickers on the software.

Va’ezi said Telegram had been sent by his ministry a notification about the unethical stickers.

According to him, Telegram’s management entity also said in its e-mail that “it has not had a direct role in the [the designing and release] of the stickers” and that certain users had designed them using an option provided to them by Telegram.

The administration of President Hassan Rouhani “has no problem with those social software and networks that work within the framework of the Islamic Republic’s laws,” Va’ezi said, adding that, “Only the activities of those networks that seek to violate that framework will be confronted.”

The Telegram application was released in August 2013 and is run by the Telegram Messenger LLP.

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