The most pervasive censorship is who and what social media companies decide to block or suppress. Even in places like China. It's deliberately harder to measure, but any censorship measurement that omits it is like measuring war casualties, but ignoring those on the front lines.

Not to minimize the impact of social media censorship, but one should really live in a country like Iran to grasp what pervasive censorship is. Most people born and raised in the relative freedoms provided in modern democratic systems have no clue what it feels like when you have such dictatorships. I say this because, looking at the current trends, we _could be_ heading in that direction, and the comparison is apt.

I'm curious what trends you see towards censorship?

Elon presumably being an exemplar for current trends: Twitter is unarguably far less censored than it was before (though censorship is still present). And Meta took note and also turned down its censorship significantly in response.

The Epstein files, while far less than hoped for by many, are another example of a trend towards sharing far more sensitive info than has been typical by past administrations.

There are many good examples you could point to of increased authoritarianism, but censorship in particular seems to be on the backswing, if anything.

Edit: oof, it's extremely concerning that the comment below was flagged

It’s too soon for such a conclusion IMO. The pervasive Iran-like censorship I was talking about will rear its ugly head when those authoritarian regimes are established. It’s a tool and I can assure you it will be used extensively. This is nothing new really.

P.S. the Epstein files were just a cruel joke! I wouldn’t list it there.

It doesn't add up for me. If the goal is simply authoritarian control, why would they employ less censorship than their predecessors?

Surely they could get away with at the very least the same amount?

Twitter is unarguably far less censored than it was before (though censorship is still present). And Meta took note and also turned down its censorship significantly in response.

A publisher making editorial decisions is not censorship. You have no right to demand Twitter publish your speech. If you don't like their editorial policies, you are free to go elsewhere. You are not prevented from speaking or even prevented from reaching an audience. None of these platforms is a monopoly.

For my money, I would prefer to hang out somewhere where people don't openly celebrate the murder of my family. Would you deny me that right? If so, you are not on the side of freedom. I don't object to the existence of forums like /pol/ or today's Twitter; if you object to the existence of moderated forums like Twitter in its prime then you are the one restricting speech.

Today, we see flagrant examples of the literal government literally prohibiting people from speaking their minds. Literal masked thugs with literal guns are literally grabbing people off the streets. This is censorship like the Soviets did it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zu3q1eYyR1A

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/19/us/politics/trump-cnn-msn...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fcc-disney-abc-early-license-re...

https://www.aclum.org/cases/ozturk-v-trump/

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2026/07/31/p...

https://www.propublica.org/article/caught-in-crackdown-ice-c...

Twitter has certainly relaxed its policies on racism and violence in recent years, and perhaps you think that's a good thing. But point out that they're paying Nazis to post about their hatred of Jews (an undisputed fact even if you object to the framing) and they'll file SLAPP suits to try to bankrupt you. They very much go in for censorship (the real kind, backed up by guys with guns) when it benefits them.

https://www.fire.org/news/fire-statement-x-corps-lawsuit-and...

A publisher making editorial decisions is not censorship. You have no right to compel other people to publish your speech. If you don't like Twitter's editorial policies, you are free to go elsewhere

When a social media deletes users posts because they cross a political line, it may not be government censorship, but it's very obviously still censorship.

It's very hard to take opinions like yours seriously because I know exactly how you'd react if all your HN posts were deleted because you're calling people "Nazis"

censorship of websites is done to move more of population onto social platforms you control

one isn't ignoring the other

Hmm.

I'd wager the vast majority of internet censorship is within platform, like that done by Reddit mods.

The most egregious example I've seen in my lifetime was when old Twitter decided to censor a NYPost article, down to blocking sharing in DMs.

It seems that type of example is entirely missed here. Is there any attempt to capture that signal?

As a thought exercise, could it be captured?

Depends on the platform. On Reddit, definitely yes, as almost all censorship is "deletion style" where the target post or comment is initially visible until the mods suppress it.

But your point is well taken, it's definitely more challenging and expensive than what's being done here.

If you count platform moderation as 'censorship' then there's practically no uncensored public spaces on the internet.

Literally even 4chan has moderation.

Nobody, not even 4chan users, want an actually unmoderated space.

4chan users might want that, but even for the types of people willing to operate a site like that they don't want to be liable for the amount of CSAM, piracy, and other legally objectionable material that would end up on a fully unmoderated site.

Deciding what is spam and blocking it is moderation or "censorship".

If 4chan didnt have spam filters, the users would be begging for it almost immediately because the website would become unusable.

We might be talking past each other a bit. I agree that without any sort of spam filter a comment site would become unusable.

What I was trying to point out is that there are a lot of users of these 'edgy' sites that would like to post content that the site owners don't want them posting. So the site owner censors and removes CSAM and piracy so that the site isn't immediately in a legal black hole. The site owners remove content that at least some of the users would want be a use they find it morally or legally objectionable. Spam is kinda orthogonal to that point, since neither the site owner or the users want to see it.

Some of the moderation is just banning people with differing opinions.

Some of the opinions that differ are really bad ones.

Yes, but some of them aren't. There are instances of people being banned because they participated in another sub. Instances of people being banned for criticizing Israel. It wouldn't be so much of an issue if it was like back in the day where there were a thousand independent boards. But Reddit killed that.

Moderation as in "You can't call the other posted 'fuckface'" and moderation as in "I will delete every mention of this news story because it's negative to the agenda I want to push" are not, at all, the same thing.

In fact, I wouldn't call the latter "moderation" at all, rather it's mods abusing their power to push political propaganda, but they do it through moderation in terms of action.

old Twitter decided to censor a NYPost article

Which article, about what subject?

Are there NYPost articles you feel people should be prevented from DMing? Or posting, for that matter?

Why do you refuse to answer the question?

The story you are referring to involved the New York Post or its affiliates breaking in to Hunter Biden's laptop (a felony) and publishing his personal correspondence, complete with unredacted phone numbers and email addresses. This violated Twitter's policies against doxxing and dissemination of hacked materials. Characterizing this as censorship is misleading; the story contained no newsworthy information and its publication violated longstanding Twitter policy. It's hard to imagine Twitter functioning without such a policy. I don't see any reason the New York Post should get away with violating it just because it claims to be a newspaper.

The Wall Street Journal, a Murdoch rag like the Post and hardly known for its liberal bias, declined to publish this information, which is why it wound up in the disreputable Post instead. Respectable journalists have ethical standards. Act like thugs, get treated like thugs.

P.S. Twitter is free to make whatever editorial decisions it pleases. Trying to make them publish something they don't want to publish is compelled speech. Compelling speech in the name of freedom of speech is hypocritical.

Measure the speed and performance of your network with the NDT test

This is very much in line with the likes of pokemon go, wiki landmark projects and what have you (those are nice things to have for autonomous drones/missiles to navigate only with vision when gps/cellular/starlink is actively blocked).

—

Russia banned stuff like speedtest because things like that may help “map” the network, aid NSA to model malware propagation, etc.

Not that this should matter when you have cisco, dell, nokia hardware, but it won’t hurt either.

—

I mean come on, some nuts even willingly install stuff like this: https://atlas.ripe.net/

I really wonder if anyone installs it on their machine. May be I am one off but I am Hearing about this for first time, don't recognize any of their partners.

I would love to contribute, but i do not think it is a good idea to install and run this in China…enough said. Also i already know the outcome: network is fast, everything is blocked

Do they arrest you just for trying to load a blocked site?

They do not. But it is pretty pointless I would guess: probably most of the domains this tries to visit will be blocked.

Documenting that fact is the point.

In China's case, it is a very well known and documented fact that heavy censorship is present. Of course if one thinks additional knowledge on that is useful enough to solicit wide user participation, that is certainly one way of thinking.

Would be cool if it also measured the latency and throughput across many different protocols to detect deviations from net neutrality.

For everyone in this thread saying "but the platforms!", I don't disagree with you. Extensive censorship exists. But I don't believe that's the intended purpose of this tool and the metrics it collects. It doesn't measure censorship at what we would call layers 4-7 in the OSI model. It's concerned with IP reachability and layer 3. It collects valid data for that purpose.

Do they distinguish between "censored in transit" and "blocked by destination"?

In the last years many sites started to drop/block connections from the countries like China and Russia. It is sad to see how Internet is becoming more and more fragmented.

The latter one isn't censorship, it's geofencing. Which is incredibly unfortunate (and always has been), but it's not censorship.

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.

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.

Anna's Archive is prevented by some countries from visiting because of its (presumably illegal) content. All restrictions are based on its content.

Is that in fact the reason? I'm not familiar with what's happening outside the USA.

See "Spotify lawsuit" in the wikipedia article. Also:

"In January 2024, Italy's ... ordered major internet service providers (ISPs) in the country to block Anna's Archive due to a copyright complaint..."

"In March 2024, ... ordered major ISPs in the Netherlands to block Anna's Archive and LibGen due to a request by advocacy group BREIN (which represents the interests of the Dutch entertainment industry)."

"In December 2024, the UK Publishers Association won an order from the High Court of Justice requiring major ISPs to block Anna's Archive... under section 97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act."

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive

I don't think they are disputing it was blocked more the reason was copyright not other reasons.

My point is - copyright is also a "content related" reason: some site is banned because the content of the site is infringing the copyright of someone else.

In the end, all censorship is content related. One could definitely argue along the spectrum of "all" to "none" censorship is appropriate, but I would guess most people actually hold the belief that "some" censorship is okay, while disagreeing on "which" censorship is okay.

If this is the case, then the bias problem is indeed relevant.

Plus, this sentence in the original post I replied to really struck me as absurd: "Content-neutral time, place, and manner restrictions aren't censorship".

Let's imagine a country bans the distribution of all writings by authors in another country/region disregard of the content. It would not be censorship according to the original post.

The fact that a ban encompasses a wide variety of content could mean simply that it is difficult/undesirable to limit the scope of the ban, but the censorship always originates from the content.

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?

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.

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

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?

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.

Yes, I do know people who voted for the party that pushes things like this in my country.

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?

I know a few. They're called "normal people who don't suffer from crippling tech libertarianism" and there's more of them than of you.

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.

"Dictatorship" is the standard forum design. Reddit, HN, X, Lemmy... All of them. And censorship is common. We literally prefer it that way. I think it's to create a solid blame trail. I think that's a necessary thing.