Six countries that block Social Networks
A lot of places have free access to the internet, but a large portion of the world has restricted access to content that is censored. In some places, governments take action and censor content through blocking it, or in worse cases deleting content or making that content simply inaccessible. There are various extremes to how censorship is handled, but it all remains unified under one simple goal: taking away internet freedom.
Different countries have different goals when it comes to internet censorship. Turkey, for example, is a functioning democracy and a member of NATO. It’s also an applicant to the European Union. What are its goals? Well, it censors content at any time that it deems necessary.
It’s well known that Turkey doesn’t hesitate to censor social media in order to “protect” its citizens from panic rising from terrorist attacks. There have been numerous instances where Turkey’s government has lashed out at anyone spreading the news about country-wide crises. This could be as simple as just distributing an image on social media of a bombing.
In March 2014, Turkey government officials banned Twitter when news of government scandals began to spread. YouTube was also blocked for two and a half years in Turkey’s main capital, Ankara, after a video insulting the founder of modern Turkey grew popular.
China is much more direct in its censorship in that it has all major social media services permanently blocked. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Google were all banned when Chinese officials claimed that social networking platforms were used to coordinate anti-government protests. These protests were harmful to the state, which cannot be tolerated. The huge amount of censorship in China has given birth to the “great firewall”.
While China seems extreme, North Korea is even more involved in banning social media. Social media in North Korea simply can’t exist, since the country has built an internal internet that is not connected to outside web sources.
Pakistan, Vietnam, and Iran also have authoritarian governments that want to control the flow of information through the internet. Social media is blocked in these countries for citizens that aren’t using a VPN.
These six countries use deep packet inspection to censor content from users. It’s also a technique used to monitor traffic, and in other places where internet isn’t censored, it’s also used to target ads and collect data on users and their internet use.
TorGuard has engineered Stealth VPN and Stealth Proxy to be a double layered security approach that gives users access to the content they want in countries that use deep packet inspection techniques. Stealth VPN is powered by OpenVPN obfuscation that makes traffic invisible by appearing like normal HTTPS traffic. Stealth VPN paired with Stealth Proxy is the best way to maintain a fast, but most importantly, secure and encrypted uncensored access to the internet.
