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Government Internet censorship is a permanent fact of life in some countries, but there are many more countries that impose Internet blocks in response to specific events. A new report says that happened on 196 occasions last year, with hundreds of millions of people affected

Some governments impose permanent restrictions on full Internet access. The biggest culprit here is China, which blocks access to a wide range of services, including:

The so-called Great Firewall of China also imposes blocks on content containing specific keywords. This includes the names of government leaders, political protests, the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and more.

But the annual report published by VPN review site Top10VPN looks instead at occasions when governments impose temporary shutdowns or blocks.

The latest report shows that there were 196 major self-imposed internet outages in 2023, across a total of 25 countries.

Iraq was the biggest offender, with a total of 66 shutdowns last year. Manipur, India, had the longest shutdown, totalling more than 5,000 hours.

Unsurprisingly, social network X topped the list of platform-specific blocks. Both news and commentary on political events and protests spread quickly on the platform, and repressive governments responded with blocks totalling 10,683 hours. Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook were also targeted.

Messaging services were also hit. These are commonly used to coordinate protests, and to circulate new the government doesnt want known. WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal were all affected.

The reasons for these blocks is not hard to guess: wars and other conflicts, military coups, protests, and elections where repressive governments aim to block reports of election interference.

When a government wants to block Internet access while pretending not to, extreme throttling is used where bandwidth is reduced to such a degree that the Internet becomes effectively unusable. This is a common tactic for governments aiming to stop the circulation of videos, including live-streaming from protests.

Protocol blocking is used when governments want to shut down certain apps, or categories of apps. Here, they block specific TCP/IP ports used by messaging apps, for example.

In addition to the obvious human rights violations involved, the site says that the economic cost is significant.

Government internet outages in 25 countries lasting over 79,000 hours cost the global economy $9.01 billion in 2023.

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Government Internet censorship was imposed 196 times last year - 9to5Mac