Hello,

In collaboration with Venezuela Inteligente, IPYS Venezuela & DFRLab, we just published a new research report, titled: "From the blocking of Wikipedia to Social Media: Venezuela's Political Crisis".

Our joint report is available via the following links:

* OONI site: https://ooni.torproject.org/post/venezuela-blocking-wikipedia-and-social-med...

* VI site: https://vesinfiltro.com/noticias/report-jan-2019/

* IPYS site: https://ipysvenezuela.org/2019/01/29/from-the-blocking-of-wikipedia-to-socia...

We share OONI data on recent, politically-motivated cases of internet censorship in Venezuela, starting off with the blocking of Wikipedia, to then sharing data on the recent blocking of Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. We also examine network anomalies that occurred during last week's protests, which show that some Google IPs might have temporarily been blocked. OONI data findings were further corroborated through manual curl testing, in collaboration with Venezuela Inteligente.

Our findings show that Venezuelan ISPs have started to rely on more advanced censorship techniques, beyond DNS-based censorship, as state-owned CANTV is implementing SNI-based filtering as well. This follows years of increased censorship events, as documented in our previous research report: https://ooni.io/post/venezuela-internet-censorship/

We observe a strong correlation between recent political events and internet censorship in Venezuela (explained comprehensively in our latest report). The situation remains tense and as political events unfold, the public can monitor censorship events through the use of OONI Probe (https://ooni.io/install/) and OONI data (https://ooni.io/data/).

We thank all OONI Probe users in Venezuela who made this study possible.

Please share our research with your networks: https://twitter.com/OpenObservatory/status/1090346458707050496

Thanks,

~ OONI team.