Internet censorship controls what information can be viewed by a certain group of Internet users, typically placed by authority entities such as governments, ISPs, or organizations, for stopping Internet-related crime or preventing individuals from accessing harmful content. However, such information control could also be largely abused by authorities to limit the free flow of information such as news and suppress and silence discussion among citizens.

Detecting such Internet censorship activities is an important step to advance inclusive and safe access to global Internet, facilitating the free flow of information, increasing at-risk-users’ digital security, and enabling free expression. To this end, we — a team of researchers from Old Dominion Univesity, Virginia Tech, and University of Delaware — developed this project “Measuring and Investigating Internet Censorship through Ground-truth based, End-to-End Framework”, aiming to explore, develop, and deploy a novel framework for accurately and automatically investigating global Internet censorship practices. Existing approaches usually require heavy, unscalable manual inspection to identify false positives while still leaving false negatives undetected. By providing a static payload as ground truth in an end-to-end framework, the occurrence of censorship can be accurately and automatically recognized. Moreover, the deployed end-to-end framework can facilitate extended measurements for investigating many other aspects of Internet censorship.

This project is funded by an Internet Freedom Fund from the Open Technology Fund (OTF), an independent non-profit organization and a grantee of the U.S. Agency for Global Media committed to support global Internet freedom technologies. The project page on OTF is listed here.