China’s censorship infrastructure is widely recognized as sophisticated, strict, and comprehensive. We conducted a qualitative study to understand Chinese citizens’ practices to navigate the censored Chinese Internet. We found that participants’ practices were closely related to their understanding of and resistance to the censorship infrastructure. Participants switched between public and priv...

One of the primary challenges facing media outlets in Pakistan is government censorship. The has traditionally maintained strict control over media, often using a range legal and extra-legal measures to stifle criticism public discourse. This included blocking or banning various news websites, harassing journalists, action silence dissent. present study designed get censorship practices viewpoi...

With Internet censorship on the rise around the world, a variety of tools have proliferated to assist Internet users to circumvent such censorship. However, there are few studies examining the implications of censorship circumvention under international law, and its related politics. This paper aims to help fill some of that void, with an examination of case studies wherein global communication...

We propose and defend a distinction between two types of self-censorship: public and private. In public self-censorship, individuals restrain their expressive attitudes in response to public censors. In private self-censorship, individuals do so in the absence of public censorship. We argue for this distinction by introducing a general model which allows us to identify, describe, and compare a ...

Censorship is becoming increasingly pervasive on the Internet, with the Open Net Initiative reporting nearly 50 countries practicing some form of censorship. Previous work has reported the existence of many forms of Internet censorship (e.g., DNS tampering, packet filtering, connection reset, content filtering), each of which may be composed to build a more comprehensive censorship system. Auto...

Recent years have seen the Internet become a key vehicle for citizens around the globe to express political opinions and organize protests. This fact has not gone unnoticed, with countries around the world repurposing network management tools (e.g., URL filtering products) and protocols (e.g., BGP, DNS) for censorship. Previous work has focused on identifying how censorship is performed. Howeve...

An increasing number of countries implement Internet censorship at different scales and for a variety of reasons. Several censorship resistance systems (CRSs) have emerged to help bypass such blocks. The diversity of the censor’s attack landscape has led to an arms race, leading to a dramatic speed of evolution of CRSs. The inherent complexity of CRSs and the breadth of work in this area makes ...

We argue that the evaluation of censorship evasion tools should depend upon economic models of censorship. We illustrate our position with a simple model of the costs of censorship. We show how this model makes suggestions for how to evade censorship. In particular, from it, we develop evaluation criteria. We examine how our criteria compare to the traditional methods of evaluation employed in ...

Social media is an area where users often experience censorship through a variety of means such as the restriction of search terms or active and retroactive deletion of messages. In this paper we examine the feasibility of automatically detecting censorship of microblogs. We use a network growing model to simulate discussion over a microblog follow network and compare two censorship strategies ...