Iran’s oldest social media network announced on Monday 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.