Almost 5 billion people are active Internet users (1), and the available digital information plays a decisive role in communication. Therefore, Internet engagement became more crucial during the current situation of the Covid-19. Due to this situation, internet access increased 7.3%, which corresponds to 316 million users (2).
Unfortunately, the increase of online users pushed an exponential rise of a massive variety of filtering and blocking of the information flow. This censorship works as automatic disapproval and consequent removal of public information, aimed at protecting the interests of governments, organizations or individuals. Government censorship is often justified in terms of “protecting the public” and “common interest”, but it hides a position that submits citizens such as artists, intellectuals and social movement groups to power influence.
Data science shows that it is possible to identify if connections are interrupted or blocked. As a result, several projects have built platforms and frameworks for analyzing these facts, such as Censored Planet (UMich), Ooni and ICLab, to understand its accurate scale and differentiate the evolution of Internet censorship and its effects on global communication.
Other study, the Censored Planet – Lost in Transmission: Investigating Filtering of COVID-19 Websites (2), published by Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC), in January 2021, demonstrated that there is clear evidence that websites containing information about the pandemic are blocked in specific countries; the global extent of this blocking and filtering is unknown. In this study, which was measured in more than 180 countries, censorship occurs in websites (DNS) that transmit information about Covid-19 worldwide. Also, this fact indicates that for two weeks, over 67 million domains that show information about Covid-19 were blocked. As expected, this information had higher blocking rates in countries known for censorship, such as China, Iran and Kazakhstan, but surprisingly, significant blocking on websites containing information about the pandemic in countries generally considered as part of the “free world”, namely Switzerland, Croatia, and Canada.
What is the science behind Censordemic? How are we getting acknowledged about online censorship?
Every day lots of users search for information, but many times this information is filtered or blocked. Like a person that throws a ball against a wall, and eventually, the ball does not come back. If there is no rebound, something has stopped it. The digital flow of information depends on communication between physical servers – big computers – where data is stocked. When users need information, they launch a request.
Similar to a social invitation, you need to go to an address, and the host needs a key to open the door.
The significant currents of information behave like a host and social. Hosts need a “home”, a domain (DNS), and keys (HTTP), and guests should look for the “home address” (IP) from their own “address”. Unfortunately, something can happen on the way to accomplish the invitation. The address gets lost in the way, which messes up the “home location”, and/or the host doesn’t have the “key” to open the door. The filtration occurs like this, and blockings take place. Sites are suddenly unavailable, searches do not work, and IPs become unknown.
One of the tools to track blocking, filtering, and censorships of domains is via Satellite, by analyzing the “hosts” invitations, how they manage their keys, and how many invitations are delivering to the guests. Thus, the flow of digital content happens in the environment of “Content networking techniques” (CDNs). The analysis of CDNs behavior reveals which “key”, “address”, or “host” has been lost, diminished, or rejecting. But we cannot imagine the astonishing amount of data that should be analyzed. Therefore, data science and data mining is the relevant data knowledge behind censorship.
Censorship Tracking
To encourage Free Speech and tackle censorship disruptions.
Net users are citizens, so we are cover by constitutional rights to access information and to communicate freely our perspective about facts in an environment of equality and freedom. However, there are some political influences that distort the information flowing. Censordemic has spotted the sources – CensoredPlanet, OONI Probe, ICLab – to track how information is filtered and blocked. We can proactively participate in this task through the use of OONI Probe and by speaking up about how censorship strategies work in digital communication. We lively encourage you too, to speack freely and to tackle disruptions of flowing info!
The Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) monitors internet censorship globally. In 2017, this project launched an App that detects blockings/filterings and automatically reports the findings by running a series of network measurements. In October 2019, OONI had alreadu analyzed 292 million network connections in 233 countries .
Censored Planet measures filtering and blocking. Censorship (CS) publishes two breakthrough studies on this area: “Censored Planet: An Internet-wide, Longitudinal Censorship Observator”(2) in 2020 and “Lost in Transmission: Investigating Filtering of COVID-19 Websites”(4) in 2021. CS gathers data regarding to multiple remote measurement techniques in over 200 countries.
References:
(1) According to Statista.com
(2) Vyas, Anjali; Raman, Ram Sundara; Ceccio, Nick; Lutscher, Philipp M. & Ensaf, Roya (2021). Censored Planet: Lost in Transmission: Investigating Filtering of COVID-19 Websites. University of Michigan, University of Oslo. Published by Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC).
(3) Raman, Ram Sundara; Shenoy, Prerana; Kohls, Katharina & Ensafi, Roya (2020). Censored Planet: An Internet-wide, Longitudinal Censorship Observatory. In Proceedings of the 2020 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS ’20), November 9-13, 2020, Virtual Event, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 18 pages.