WASHINGTON (AFP) - The United States on Tuesday (Jan 2) urged Iran to stop blocking online social media and advised its citizens to set up virtual private networks, or VPNs, to circumvent online censorship.

Steve Goldstein, the State Department's under-secretary for public diplomacy, denounced Iran's attempts to restrict Internet access and urged Iranians to find a way to log in.

"People in Iran should be able to access these sites through VPN," he said, adding that the State Department's own Farsi language Facebook page has around 700,000 subscribers.

"The more available these sites are the better it is," he said, as street protests continued against what US President Donald Trump has branded Iran's "brutal and corrupt" regime.