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Comment by mitxela

9 hours ago

There's a pretty bad bias problem here because the probe app scans domains that are frequently blocked in dictatorships, but doesn't scan domains that are frequently blocked in "democracies", like Anna's Archive. Then it ends up looking like the dictatorship countries have all the censorship.

22 comments

mitxela

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orbital-decay  4 hours ago

Internet blocking is a last resort for regimes that can't do anything against the source of the information or intermediaries, but it's a red herring in regimes that can. Anna's Archive has a political position and is one of the very few voices that survived the immense pressure. How many didn't? How many attempts were not performed at all because of it? This suppression is really hard to measure, OONI can't do anything here, it measures blocking. It's very simple to understand.

averysmallbird  7 hours ago

Scare quoting democracies is probably telling, but OONI absolutely does test content blocked in Western countries. https://explorer.ooni.org/domain/annas-archive.org

  • vlyan  4 hours ago

    scare quoting """""""""democracies""""""""" is perfectly acceptable when it couldn't be more obvious that those so-called democracies do anything but represent the will of their peoples. do you know anyone who'd voted for having to scan their face to access verboten webseites? to have encryption backdoors in their messengers? to have state-mandated spyware preinstalled on their phones?

    • armchairhacker  2 hours ago

      They don’t represent the people’s will, but unfortunately many people believe in censorship, so even if they were true direct democracies we may still see some.

      1 reply →

    • dartharva  1 hour ago

      ...you'd be surprised, plenty of regular people actually want these things to happen. State is God for reliably the majority of the population of the world (seeing as the majority resides in China and South Asia).

qerghnui  8 hours ago

I would only use the term "censorship" to refer to the prevention of speech based on its content. Content-neutral time, place, and manner restrictions aren't censorship according to the way I use the word, and neither is copyright protection.

Note that censorship isn't necessarily bad and restrictions on speech that aren't censorship aren't necessarily acceptable. The prohibition on child pornography is censorship but I support it, while I am opposed to IP law in its entirety.

kurthr  7 hours ago

It all depends on what you're censoring.

Is it a bad sign if CSAM, Personal (medical, financial, etc) Records, Snuff, and Malware/Ransomeware are censored? What about manufacture of WMDs, terrorism, hate speech? Free software, and copyrighted music? Historical records of genocide?

  • nottorp  7 minutes ago

    Is there any authority in any country in the world that can be trusted to censor just what it's supposed to censor?

    Doubt it. Besides malice there's also incompetence.

    See the article that's also on the front page right now about Spain blocking Cloudflare (i.e. half the internet) during football matches.

  • SV_BubbleTime  7 hours ago

    As an aside… the if there was a real system out there that was trustworthy, it would have all of this and it would be the evidence you actually need to trust it.

    If someone had a secure system for some of the worst stuff out there and it lasted more than a minute, pay attention because they might have actually solved some real problems.