The Shifting Landscape of Global Internet Censorship

Clark, Justin; Faris, Robert; Morrison-Westphal, Ryan J.; Noman, Helmi; Tilton, Casey; Zittrain, Jonathan

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2993485

Cited by 27 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…Concerns on such risks have risen due to the increasing emphasis on censorship and surveillance worldwide nowadays. As shown by [22], the global Internet censorship is undergoing a shift from the website filtering to the content-wise surveillance, particularly amid the heightened scrutiny on social media websites after the misinformation spreading during a series of terrorist attacks in New Zealand [47], Sri Lanka [45] and Myanmar [12].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

It’s Not Just the Site, It’s the Contents: Intra-domain Fingerprinting Social Media Websites Through CDN Bursts

Wang

Zhang

Bai

et al. 2021

Proceedings of the Web Conference 2021

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The website fingerprinting (or inter-domain WSF), enhanced by various machine learning techniques, has shown its power to identify websites a user has visited. To our best knowledge, a finer-grained problem of web page fingerprinting (or intra-domain WPF) has not been systematically studied by our research community. The WPF attackers, such as government agencies enforcing Internet censorship, are keen to identify the particular web pages (e.g., a political dissident's social media page) visited by the target user.In this work, we investigate the intra-domain WPF among social media websites, against the realistic on-path passive attack scenario. We reveal that delivering large-size data such as images and videos via Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), which is a common practice in social media websites, makes intra-domain WPF highly feasible. The network traffic generated during rendering a social media page exhibits temporal and volumetric patterns that are sufficiently recognizable by machine learning algorithms. We characterize such patterns as CDN bursts, and use features extracted from them to empower classification algorithms to achieve a high classification accuracy (96%) and a low false positive rate (0.02%).

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

It’s Not Just the Site, It’s the Contents: Intra-domain Fingerprinting Social Media Websites Through CDN Bursts

Wang

Zhang

Bai

et al. 2021

Proceedings of the Web Conference 2021

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“…On the contrary, in countries with restricted press freedom, the governments’ regulations and restrictions also apply to the Internet. Zittrain et al (2017) found that Yemen, one of the low press freedom countries in our sample, engages in high pervasive filtering where a majority of political news content is blocked, and the permissible content is also filtered. When authorities restrict the flow of online information, it also quells the access to quality information.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 79%

“…Overall, press freedom in the Arab states is largely restricted. We see an effort by some nations to promote media freedom, while others continue to undermine and restrict media outlets including online forums (Zittrain et al, 2017). This variance in the intersection of media and politics in the Arab region will allow us to empirically tease out the impact of press freedom on Internet use and protest participation gaps.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Internet and political (in)equality in the Arab world: A multi-country study of the relationship between Internet news use, press freedom, and protest participation

Ahmed

Cho

2019

New Media & Society

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This study investigates the role of the Internet in protest participation in the Arab world. More specifically, we aim to address three important questions: (1) Does Internet news use increase the chances of protest participation? (2) Does Internet news use amplify or reduce participation gaps that exist among individuals at various socioeconomic strata? (3) How does a country’s press freedom act as a contextual factor to shape the role of the Internet in affecting protest participation gaps? The results based on an analysis of the third wave of Arab Democracy Barometer survey suggest that Internet news use for political purposes increases the likelihood of protest participation in the Arab world while it also deepens socioeconomic stratification in participation. Furthermore, national press freedom shapes the intervening role of the Internet. We discuss the theoretical implications of these findings for political inequality literature and the practical consequences for the Arab world.

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“…It is in this regard common to single out authoritarian regimes, especially in Asia and the Middle East, for their filtering and repressive practices (Zittrain et al, 2017), but similar practices, albeit less extreme and with different justifications, are also enacted in the so-called liberal West. We could refer here to the blocking of Pirate Bay and similar sites enabling peer-to-peer sharing of copyright protected digital content or the repression against members of Anonymous (Wesselingh, 2014;Earl and Beyer, 2014).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

A genealogy of communicative affordances and activist self-mediation practices

Cammaerts¹

2019

Citizen Media and Practice

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In this chapter, the focus is on the various ways in which activists across time and space have appropriated traditional mediaprint cultures, audio and broadcastingas well as telecommunication and the internet to develop resistance practices. In doing so, I will present a historical dimension and discuss the various ways in which counter-cultures and activists have shaped information and communication technologies into tools of resistance to suit their particular needs. As such, a conceptual connection is made between the self-mediation practices of activists, communicative affordances and the mediation opportunity structure. Across various media and communication technologies, a set of affordances which enable activist mediation practices are identified. These affordances are situated at the level of 1) Temporalitylinked to the affordances of asynchronous and real-time communicative practices; 2) Spatialityrelated to the affordance of media and communication technologies to collapse distance, as well as enable both private and public communicative practices; and 3) Resistanceimplicating the affordance to circumvent state-imposed limitations and to hack and shape technologies. It is concluded that while the Empire always strikes back, new affordances will be discovered, and new creative workarounds imagined, rejuvenating old practices as well as constituting new ones. IntroductionMany scholars, including many contributors to this edited collection, have in recent years made valuable contributions to build conceptual bridges between media and communication studies and social movement studies. In doing so, the central role of media, of communication tools, and of self-mediation practices in the context of contentious politics has been foregrounded and better theorized. Media and communication are deemed to be crucial to assert a collective identity and circulate movement discourses, either independently or through the mainstream media, but they are equally important in terms of mobilizing efforts for direct actions and organising a movement.In this chapter, I will provide a historical overview of the various ways in which activists and social movements have appropriated, used, and above all shaped media and communication technologies to fit a set of self-mediation practices in support of their broader movement goals. At the same time, we can also observe persistent attempts by the powers that be to limit and constrain the emancipatory potentials of media and communication technologies to act as tools of resistance.

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The Shifting Landscape of Global Internet Censorship

Cited by 27 publications

References 3 publications

It’s Not Just the Site, It’s the Contents: Intra-domain Fingerprinting Social Media Websites Through CDN Bursts

It’s Not Just the Site, It’s the Contents: Intra-domain Fingerprinting Social Media Websites Through CDN Bursts

The Internet and political (in)equality in the Arab world: A multi-country study of the relationship between Internet news use, press freedom, and protest participation

A genealogy of communicative affordances and activist self-mediation practices

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