MNA – The Parliament has held a closed session Sun. morning to assess the current state of cyberspace and the influence of popular foreign messaging apps in the country.


Abolfazl Hassanbeigi, a member of the Parliament’s national security commission, told Mehr News correspondent that today’s closed session was focused on evaluating the challenges for developing domestic messaging apps.

Secretary of Iran's Supreme Council of Cyberspace, Abolhassan Firouzabadi, talked about lack of necessary budget for development of domestic messaging apps, the MP added.

He maintained that lawmakers are against blocking the cyberspace, but are calling for the development of Iranian messaging apps to replace the popular foreign ones.

Speaking at a specialized conference on ‘Big Data – Internet of Things' last Monday, Firouzabadi had promoted the idea of developing domestic messaging apps that would prove to be popular enough to obviate the need for banning foreign apps such as Telegram.

With the introduction of Channels in Telegram as a tool for broadcasting messages to a large audience in Sep. 2015, this social media platform gained considerable popularity among Iranian netizens. According to statistics, Iran with a population of 80 million, has 47 million social media users, and more than 40 million of them use Telegram as their primary messaging app.