[ooni-talk] Report: Burundi blocks social media amid 2020 general election

[Maria Xynou]

Hello,

Today we published a report on the blocking of social media in Burundi
amid its 2020 general election.

You can read the report here:
https://ooni.org/post/2020-burundi-blocks-social-media-amid-election/

OONI measurements collected from Burundi reveal the blocking of 18
social media platforms on 20th May 2020 (election day), including
skype.com, youtube.com, whatsapp.com, twitter.com, facebook.com,
instagram.com -- among many others.

These sites appear to be blocked -- on Econet (AS37336) and Viettel
Burundi (AS327799) -- through the use of some form of Deep Packet
Inspection (DPI) technology, as the blocking only occurs when we attempt
to establish an HTTPS connection (resulting in connection reset errors),
as opposed to the IPs being blocked or the DNS queries being interfered
with.

OONI data also shows the blocking of the WhatsApp and Telegram apps, and
suggests that access to Facebook Messenger was blocked too.

Interestingly, the blocking of Facebook Messenger on the Lacell Burundi
(AS327720) network was implemented on a DNS level by returning an IP
address in the DNS answer which is in the “reserved for future use”
240.0.0.0/8 netblock.

As OONI measurements have been collected from multiple local networks in
Burundi since 2016, we were able to compare measurements over time.

This is the first time that we are observing the blocking of social
media in Burundi, and the blocking clearly appears to have started in
the morning of 20th May 2020, on election day.

You can expand upon this study through the use of OONI Probe
(https://ooni.org/install/) and OONI data (https://ooni.org/data/).

All OONI measurements collected from Burundi are available here:
https://explorer.ooni.org/search?until=2020-05-22&probe_cc=BI

Please help share the report with your networks:
https://twitter.com/OpenObservatory/status/1263488638924587009

Thanks,

~ OONI team.

-- 
Maria Xynou
Research & Partnerships Director
Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI)
https://ooni.org/
PGP Key Fingerprint: 2DC8 AFB6 CA11 B552 1081 FBDE 2131 B3BE 70CA 417E


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