A huge swathe of web pages blocked by four聽countries has been discovered. The list of blocked sites is roughly ten times larger than previously documented and gives insights into the kind of content China, Indonesia, Iran and Turkey most commonly restrict online.
In China, news and media, search engines and translators were some of the most common pages to be blocked and in Indonesia it was personal ads and shopping sites. By far the biggest category blocked in Iran was blogs and personal pages, with websites that explain how to avoid web filtering the next largest category.
Turkey blocks many sites associated with gambling, which is tightly regulated there, but also, unexpectedly, a large number of dating sites too. In total the team found nearly six million censored web pages.
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One thing that couldn鈥檛 be tracked was content within social media 鈥� where state censors, particularly in China, are known to be highly active. For example, China recently tried to get Weibo, the country鈥檚 equivalent to Twitter, to ban content relating to homosexuality. The firm decided not to go ahead with the censorship following public outcry.
It is relatively easy to check whether a known website is blocked. But that doesn鈥檛 get you very far in terms of mapping censorship. 鈥淭he problem that we and a few others have been banging our heads against for quite a while is what about the websites that you don鈥檛 know are blocked?鈥� says Joss Wright at the University of Oxford.
To solve this, Wright and his colleagues designed a web crawler that could gather links to other sites from pages the team knew were blocked. If any of those links pointed to other, previously undetected sites, the tool would then go on to check if they were blocked too.
鈥淲hen you get that data, you鈥檙e into the policy, the things that the censorship authorities care to censor more than others,鈥� says Wright.
Internet censorship can potentially put people at personal risk, says at Human Rights Watch. 鈥淚f there was a big financial crisis in China and the government was censoring information about it, people could face real economic harm and hardship without having access to any information about what it was happening,鈥� he says.
Read more: How free speech can become censorship 鈥� and how to solve it
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