Iran has a population of 80 million with 45 million of their citizens being internet users according to Internet World Stats. Although Iran is known for blocking websites they are also known for it being easy to get past the censorship. The government reportedly makes money off citizens who buy software which allow internet users to bypass the censorship.
According to the BBC Country Profile of Iran, internet access is easy and affordable for middle-class households. Although, blocked sites have included Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Flickr and YouTube. There are bloggers and online activists that speak out but are often arrested.
There is little known about Iran's censorship because Iranian citizens who probe the network from inside the country risk reprisals from the government. According to The Washington Post,
"Earlier this year, two anonymous Iranians teamed up with Alex Halderman, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan, to conduct one of the first systematic studies of Iranian Internet censorship to be published outside Iran. Halderman presented his findings at a Tuesday talk at the Usenix Security conference in Washington, D.C."
In 2009, after the disputed presidential elections, many Iranians took to social media to voice their opinions and organize protests. This eventually led the Iranian government to ban Facebook and Twitter. According to Aljazeera America,
"Since the election of Iranian President Hasan Rouhani, social media have played a central role in his administration’s media strategy. Rouhani has two Twitter accounts — that he uses to frequently tweet on matters of foreign and domestic affairs. "
Patrick Howell O'neill from The Daily Dot states, "In Iran, anti-censorship is big money." He goes on to say that even though the Iranian government spends millions on censorship, its citizens spend millions on their own anti-censorship software. It is known by the people of Iran that the Iranian system isn't hard to beat.
"On it, many of the Web’s biggest sites, including Facebook and Twitter, are blocked. Pay a couple of bucks for a virtual private network (VPN), however, and you can access much of the Internet as the rest of the world sees it."
Many of these VPN's are sold openly which makes the censorship ineffective. According to The Daily Dot, nearly 7 in 10 young Iranians are using VPNs and a Google search for “buy VPN” in Persian returns 2 million results. "Iran’s Cyber Police (FATA) have waged a high-volume open war against the VPNs, but it’s still very easy to find, buy, and use the software."