The United States has taken off air Iranian hundreds of Iranian and Iran-linked news websites that it claims are disseminating false information.
On Tuesday, many Iranian news websites were down, with notifications stating that they had been “seized” by the US, along with FBI and Department of Commerce seals.
Iran’s Press TV and Yemen’s Iran-aligned rebel Houthi movement’s al-Masirah TV are among them.
It comes amid rising tensions between the US and Iran over the possibility of re-enacting the nuclear deal.
According to Reuters, the US Department of Justice announced that it had confiscated 33 websites maintained by the Iranian Islamic Radio and Television Union (IRTVU) and three more run by the Iran-backed Kataib Hezbollah militia in Iraq.
The domains used by IRTVU were held by a US business, according to the Justice Department, and IRTVU had not received a license from the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control prior to utilizing them. Kataib Hezbollah, which the US has labeled as a terrorist organization, was also denied a license.
“The United States Government has seized the domain alalamtv.net in response to a seizure warrant… as part of a law enforcement action by the Bureau of Industry and Security, Office of Export Enforcement, and Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Notices were also posted on the websites of Press TV, Iran’s leading English language satellite television program, and Al Alam, its Arabic-language counterpart. Lualua TV, a Bahraini independent channel broadcasting from the United Kingdom was also taken down.
The Houthi movement in Yemen confirmed that its almasirah.net website had been disabled. Iran backs the Houthis, who control a large part of western Yemen but denies arming them.
The majority of the confiscated domain names were.com,.net, and.tv addresses. The.com and.net domains are generic domains that are not tied to a specific country.
The.tv domain is owned by Tuvalu in the Pacific, although it is managed by Verisign in the United States. Seizing another country’s top-level domain, such as Iran’s.ir, could be considered a violation of sovereignty.
Several of the sites were back online with new domain addresses within hours.
A similar statement appears on the websites of Iranian and regional media networks, claiming that the domains of the websites have been “seized by the United States Government,” in what looks to be a coordinated move.
The latest development comes only days after Ebrahim Raisi, a hard-line anti-Western cleric, was elected President of the Islamic Republic.
The United States and Iran have long been adversaries, but ties have deteriorated since then-US President Donald Trump pulled out of a nuclear deal between Iran and six global powers in 2018 reimposing crushing economic sanctions
Despite the fact that current US President Joe Biden wants to rejoin the agreement, both sides insist that the other must first comply.
On Sunday, envoys for Iran and the five remaining signatories – China, France, Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom – met in Vienna for the sixth round of talks aimed at reviving the accord.
Indirectly, representatives from the United States have taken part.
There are no private television or radio stations in Iran, hence all of the news stations are managed by the government. Satellite dishes are likewise banned, despite their widespread use.
In the past, Iranian authorities have used cherry pickers to search balconies for satellite dishes and tanks to demolish confiscated satellite dishes as a show of force.
The US confiscated 92 websites in October, alleging that Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC) was using them to propagate political disinformation.
The Iranian government has not issued an official response to the measure, but Iranian media sources have accused the US of censorship.
