AFP:

Iran’s oldest social media network announced today it is shutting down after years of battling censors, saying they had allowed foreign sites such as Instagram to take over.

Cloob website was launched 12 years ago as the Iranian answer to Facebook and Google’s now-dead Orkut, and at its peak had some two million users in the country.

But the challenge of monitoring the deluge of photos from women not to show hair and removing politically sensitive comments led to frequent clashes with the authorities.

“Cloob.com was entirely blocked three times and the last time it took 28 days to unblock it,” said company director Mohammad Javad Shakouri Moghadam in a blog post.

“Like a farmer, a webmaster knows how hard it is to rejuvenate a land that has dried up for 28 days,” he wrote, adding that his team no longer had the “energy or enthusiasm” to keep fighting.

Iran banned Facebook primarily due to lack of oversight, especially women sharing photos of themselves without a headscarf, which is illegal under the country’s Islamic laws.

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