iMAP 2023 Internet Censorship Report - Errata

When going through the country reports, please see clarification or correction of errors as below:

General notes

1. The confirmed blocked websites are based on the data where at least 1 time it was found confirmed blocked, meaning that the testing result shows a trace to a government or ISP-mandated blocking of the website. This typically means that there is a block page served when the user tries to access the website on a particular network, or that DNS resolution returns an IP address associated with censorship. These cases are automatically annotated as “confirmed blocked” based on fingerprints added to OONI’s database. When a website is found confirmed blocked, it may only be blocked on specific networks and still remain accessible on the rest. Confirmed blockings may also be specific based on the URL; for example https://abc.com/ may be censored but not https://www.abc.com/. 

2. The websites tested for censorship on OONI are either from the Citizen Lab test lists or additional websites tested by users. While the websites in the test lists are categorized based on certain standardized categories, the percentage of blocked or likely blocked cases may not necessarily reflect the entire state of internet censorship in the country as only sampled websites are included in the testing.

iMAP Myanmar 2023 Internet Censorship Report

1. On page 27, there is a list of ‘New Blocked Websites in 2023’. This is only in comparison with the blockings recorded in 2022, and so some of the websites may already have been blocked since before 2022 but not found blocked in 2022.

2. In Figure 5 (page 32) as below, the accessibility should be measured based on the percentage of OK counts. The number of OK counts heightened during Q4 2022 is most likely due to the increase in testing during the period. The correct figure should be the following chart. Based on this figure, it was found that the accessibility varies, but a number of websites were found totally not accessible during Q1 2023.

Figure 5 (Current chart): Accessibility of 19 blocked websites under the social networking category. 

Figure 5 (Corrected chart): Accessibility of 19 blocked websites under social networking category. Accessibility here refers to the number of measurements annotated as “OK” based on OONI’s heuristics.

iMAP Vietnam 2023 Internet Censorship Report

1. On page 26, referring to the paragraph as follows:

The top three censored pages with the highest number of likely blocking counts and the fewest accessible were:

• BBC (www.bbc.com): with 2,839 likely blocking and 312 accessible counts.
• RF (www.rfi.fr) with 985 likely blocking and 72 accessible counts.
• Cali today (www.baocalitoday.com) with 936 likely blocking and 45 accessible counts.

This should be corrected to:

 The top three censored domains with the strongest signals of blocking were:

• BBC (www.bbc.com): with 98.9% blocked or likely blocked measurements.
• Cali today (www.baocalitoday.com) with 95.4% blocked or likely blocked measurements.
• RF (www.rfi.fr) with 93.2% blocked or likely blocked measurements.

 Note: Blocked or likely blocked refer to measurements presenting signs of blocking (“confirmed blocked”, “anomalous” or “failure”)

2. On Page 39, a chart on the testing of RiseupVPN test should be ignored as the test is currently out of date and not representative of testing of censorship. 

3. Referring to Figure 21 (Page 34) as below:

To provide further clarity on this, the table below shows the total number of measurements by network: