Hello Oonitarians,
Today, in collaboration with Bytes for All Pakistan, we published a research study titled "How Pakistan blocked news outlets, social media sites, and IM apps amidst protests".
Our study is available here: https://ooni.torproject.org/post/how-pakistan-blocked-social-media/ and http://content.bytesforall.pk/node/224
Last weekend, a number of social media sites and news outlets were reportedly blocked in Pakistan during Islamist protests.
Through the collection and analysis of OONI network measurements from Pakistan, we confirmed the DNS-based blocking of:
* 14 news websites
* Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram
* Facebook Messenger, Telegram, WhatsApp's web interface (web.whatsapp.com)
All of these censorship events were temporarily implemented last weekend (25th & 26th November), and no longer seem to be in place (at least in the networks where tests were/are run). This highlights the need to monitor internet censorship on an ongoing basis around the world.
In our previous study with Bytes for All (https://ooni.torproject.org/post/pakistan-internet-censorship/), Pakistani ISPs appeared to be applying "smart filters", selectively blocking the HTTP versions of certain Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter webpages, rather than blocking access to entire domains.
Last weekend, however, these sites were blocked entirely.
This is also the first time that we have collected technical evidence on the censorship of news websites in Pakistan.
In addition to network measurement findings, our report also include censorship circumvention advice and information on how to reproduce this study (in Pakistan or elsewhere).
Thanks for reading!
~ The OONI team.