from Hacker News

Many WhatsApp accounts with Iranian numbers are disabled, even outside of Iran

by nasir on 9/22/22, 10:42 AM with 28 comments

• by dang on 9/22/22, 12:06 PM

  Edit: we've merged this thread into https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32934936, except the ones that were responding to the editorialized title.

  ---

  Original comment:

  There's also https://twitter.com/YourAnonCentral/status/15727650099729899... (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32937397, but we merged that thread hither).

  It's clear that accounts are having trouble communicating but the various tweets on this seem to have conflicting explanations about who is doing it. Is this known?

  Edit: the OP editorialized the title, which is against the site guidelines (please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). We've changed it now to what the tweet actually says—which is agnostic on the above point.

  Submitted title was "WhatsApp has disabled communication between accounts from Iran during protests".) Submitters: Please don't do that! It has an enormous impact on threads, as it did here, and usually a very bad one.

• by shadowgovt on 9/22/22, 12:06 PM

  As distasteful as it can be to Western sensibilities, nobody should be surprised when an international corporation complies with the law of the nation in which it is operating.

  It's one of the things that makes a corporation international.

• by eqvinox on 9/22/22, 12:03 PM

  The HN summary line is very confusing (for me), from reading "between accounts from Iran" I was astounded that Iranian accounts would still be able to communicate with foreign accounts.

  But the tweet indicates they just disabled accounts with Iranian phone numbers.

  (Subject line at time of this comment: "WhatsApp has disabled communication between accounts from Iran during protests")

  (… and it was fixed 12 minutes later, thanks dang!)

• by miduil on 9/24/22, 10:11 AM

  Honestly it show's how much of marketing stunt/performance this is for Signal. Literally ever since they've released the proxy configuration - no pull requests were accepted, Issues can't be opened and no updates were published. If they want to have people deploy proxies, they should at least make sure that who deploys them is doing this in a safe fashion for everyone involved.

• by j3th9n on 9/22/22, 11:53 AM

  What would the incentive be for Meta?

• by amadeuspagel on 9/22/22, 10:48 AM

  If only there was some principle that WhatsApp could abide by, rather then being torn between different governments, pressure groups ...