Censorship (Online)
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What it is
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The restriction of access to information or the ability to speak, carried out by actors ranging from governments to network administrators to the platforms themselves.
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Why it matters
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It's framed here as always incompatible with the right to freedom of expression, however it's carried out. Corporate platform censorship has grown alongside government pressure — sometimes covert requests to take content down, sometimes overt legal requirements — and evading it is only half the problem: hiding the fact that you're evading it is often the harder half.
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How it works
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Circumvention tools work at different layers and each only defeats a specific layer of blocking: encrypted DNS bypasses basic DNS-based blocking but doesn't hide what you're visiting from your ISP; a VPN or Tor hides what you visit from network administrators but not that you're using a VPN/Tor in the first place; pluggable transports (Obfs4proxy, Meek, Shadowsocks) disguise that traffic further, but sophisticated adversaries can still detect circumvention attempts through active probing or deep packet inspection. Decentralized platforms like Matrix, which have no central authority able to arbitrarily close accounts, offer censorship resistance at the platform level rather than the network level.
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Related
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Cards