Internet Censorship Report
- by Antonio Lupetti
- 48
- June 27, 2010
According to the latest data released on OpenNet Initiative and Reporters Without Borders 12 are the countries which have adopted a form of Internet censorship at a pervasive or substantial level. China, with a population of over 1.3 billion people and 360 million active users of the Internet is by far the nation in which the censors’ activity affects the highest number of citizens, followed in their list by Iran, Vietnam and Egypt.
It is striking to note that based on these figures, approximately 1.72 billion people are affected by the Internet censorship: a significant information which corresponds to 25.3% of the planet population estimated to be 6.79 billion people.
Moreover, in many cases, the censorship is not limited to filter the information accessible via the web but it also becomes a tool used by governments to fight their opponents. As reported by Reporters Without Borders China, Vietnam, Iran, Syria, Egypt and Burma (Myanmar) are the countries in which censorship is applied as a form of repression. China leads these sad standings with 72 netizens imprisoned, followed by Vietnam (17) and Iran (13), Syria (4) Egypt and Burma (2).
No data is available for North Korea.
© 2010 Woork Up
Sources:
OpenNet Initiative
Reporters Without Borders
Internet World Stats
Wolfram Alpha
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Looks like somebody has forgotten about Republic of Belarus.
good job as usual Antonio! retweeted immediately!
Thanks Daniele! Nicola and I are working hard to improve the contents of Woork Up!
I’m an Iranian. Let me say something about censorship in Iran. Government filter many sites that contains pornographic or political content.It is true but the main problem is not from the government because we can use proxies like Ultrasurf to broke the censorship. The main problem is from USA that dictate its political decision to sites like yahoo, google and many more. For example we can’t download from sourceforge, google code, or download chrome, flashplayer, yahoo messenger and many more. Yes ofcourse we can use proxy to download from those sites but when they inform us that we are from the forbidden countries. But what about these situation. For example, we can’t use sites that use Google AJAX Libraries API correctly. Because google doesn’t load that library for Iranian to prevent iranian intent users from making Nuclear weapons i guess! how an iranian internet user which is a normal intenet user know that he or she is filtered. Another example is yahoo messenger Yahoo! redirect its iranian users to yahoo web messenger when thay want to download yahoo messenger without informing that they were redirected to web messenger. First time i think that they canceled their yahoo messenger windows application. There is a long list of censorship which is out of this comment like censorship that is applied in scientific sites. They show us another page which isn’t contains useful information.Finally i appreciate you to read my comment and sorry for my bad English.
Hi Arman, thanks a lot for your comment. I really appreciated your useful contribute.
Antonio please change the Ahmadinejad photo with Khamenei the supreme leader of Islamic Republic. Ahmadinejad is just the marionette of Khamenei.
We fight in Iran to change the regime not just to change a stupid president.
God protects your freedom!
Hopefully our new PM will see the light and you wont need to add Australia to the list.
Hi Duane. Australia is not in this list because its censorship level is not considered pervasive or substantial.
Very nice and interesting infographic!
Thanks Joffrey
Nice report!
Sadly, the Australian government is trying to implement censorship in the form of a mandatory internet filter for all Australians.
Good report. Sadly, the desire to censor seems to increasing. Some Australian politicians have been pushing for involuntary filters and in the US politicians sometimes also jump on the censorship bandwagon.
I’m fairly certain that you should do a worldwide trawl and not focus only on the regimes that you are not happy with.
adding (accidently hit submit by tabbing and no edit option exists):
eg: Morrocco and the oppression of Western Sahara – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Morocco
really nice repot…
antonio i think you always make a really good job..
:D
Ooh, the populations of several countries with some level of internet censorship, ooh.
They forgot Australia in the graph…
Kilian as I said to Duane in a previous comment, Australia is not in this list because its censorship level is not considered pervasive or substantial.
How about Turkey? We are the “No Youtube Land”.
One thing to note is that most of these countries are either communist or islamist.
Good Post!
I’m from Tunisia (.tn and +216) the censorship is generally concentrated on pornographic like sites, political content or sites that harms our overall success in many sectors. After all in real world many countries including the U.S uses censorship at its own style ;).
The rest of the Internet is -available-.
Thank you Antonio!
Yeah gotta agree with Kilian, they forgot Australia.
Also New Zealand is forgotten.
>> How about Turkey? We are the “No Youtube Land”
Indeed. In addition, richarddawkins.net, forum.ateizm2.org/ and countless other atheist/free-thinker web sites/forums are banned in Turkey.
Youtube is also banned in china.
Regarding Internet Censorship, you’ve missed some other countries. As Esin mentioned it, Turkey is in important one. The authorities have locked YouTube and all porn website. In the Emirates too, many website are not accessible. They are mostly located in the Gulf.
By the way, to some extend, in many poor countries, bandwidth is so restricted (you just not want to wait so long to watch a clip on YouTube) and Internet access very limited to a small (wealthy) part of the population that local authorities doesn’t feel the need – yet – to proceed to censorship over Internet.
I’ve just checked your sources. You definitely have to include in your graphic the States under surveillance (Australia, Bahrain, Belarus, Eritrea, Malaysia, Russia, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Turkey and United Arab Emirates).
As soon as it’s done, email me so I can pass it further. The information and your presentation is worth it !
I didn’t forgot these Countries… their level of censorship is not considered “pervasive” or substantial.
Awesome article Antonio, I really like the new way of the blog.
Thanks David, I’m working hard to improve continuously the contents…
Forgot about Thailand?!? 210,110 websites blocked…
Please sign the Freedom Against Censorship Thailand (FACT) petition against censorship—facthai.wordpress.com/sign
Awesome! Great job!
One of my friends in Iran/Persia mentioned that he could access YouTube depends on what key words being used on that page!
Lets say there is video on YouTube with title of ‘Iran’s green movement’! Then that’s blocked obviously because of the keywords ‘green movement’…
So to get away with this, my friend told me they use something like ’9reen nn0vennent’…
HAHAHA!
There are still ways…
BUT don’t even think about porn sites…!
THANKS!
I find the graphics rather misleading on several points. The “Values in million except China in billion” is arguably the biggest mistake from an infographic point of view. (That it is written in a small gray font just adds to it.)
I also find the statement that 1.7 billion people is affected by censorship rather misleading as non-internet users in said countries are affected to a much lesser extent (if at all.) According to your graphic the number of internet users affected adds up to about 450 million people, which is of course still an unimaginably large figure.
My point is that these kind of errors are most likely unintentional yet they can still undermine the credibility of your report.
Thanks for your suggestions Marton. I’ll take a mind them for my new posts.
Hi Antonio, nice report.
Sadly with black background and white fonts its impossible to read the article in google reader. Reader uses white background by default and the images for some reason are not available.
Thanks
Hi Dimitris, I know this problem… I’m looking for a solution.
That’s great but what about Turkey!? Here we can’t access Youtube and some of Google’s services such as maps etc..and we cant even access any porn sties…
And who sold them the software to do the censoring? Western companies. The same ones that install similar software in western corporations to block their staff from viewing sites not deemed relevant by their management. Censorship can be very subtle indeed.
Who decides what is “substantive“ or/and “pervasive” censorship.
To use the same measurements for open (authoritarian) regimes or dictatorship (or religous, lèse-majesty, trappings, historic taboo’s) with free, secular democratic countries doesn’t meet my requirements …
Nice article, thank you for sharing.
the best way to fight with the internet censorship is using ultraSurf (Freeware)
you can download at http://www.ultrareach.com/
easy , Simple & More
I use it in Iran and have not problem with the censorship.
TNX Hamid
LOVE Arman’s comment … usa needs to be on here … after all, they make and sell the equipment most countries use for censorship
It’s a shame the percentages of the two countries that are leaders of internet censorship don’t match with the faces provided. It’s a shame we don’t have the faces of the Vietnamese and the Egyptian leaders because they top the list. Am I reading percentages correctly?
It’s one thing to have relevant, insightful content, but another thing altogether to be able to convey it in such a beautiful way. It’s so nicely laid out and easy to consume.
Really nice job.
Thanks a lot Mia!
Dear Sirs
Web site censoring is an important problem for computer users in my country. The censorers censor the sexual and political sites. They censor all types of proxy tools, proxy websites, all the anti-filtering software, virtual private networks and downloads and even censor-discussion sites as soon as they are released in internet. A dictatorship rules in my country. Sometimes users notice that they censor other ordinary sites which don’t have any outrageous materials.
for instance when users click on the links that they offer each other in Yahoo messenger, they immediately notice that they are censored in a manner that they can only see the text of the proffered link not the pictures. This is the most ruthless manner of controlling people by dictators who regard people as idiots who should be controlled by some dirty spiritualist.
I’d like to ask you a question as an internet expert. Considering the above facts, can you guide me how I can access at least the ordinary sites which I need to use in my course of study?
Thank you for your early reply
Sincerely yours
Mehrdad Shamsara
what yahoo does to Iranian is humiliating…they can simply tell us that they cant support Iranian user to download their softwares..etc…but what they do is redirecting us to use their yahoo messenger for web…thats just a big insult.