[ooni-talk] New report: Social media disruptions in Mali amid 2018 presidential election

[Maria Xynou]

Hello,

Last Sunday, social media was reportedly inaccessible in Mali amid
presidential elections.

Today, OONI published a short report providing network measurement data
that corroborates local reports on the blocking of social media during
the elections.

Our report is available here:
https://ooni.torproject.org/post/mali-disruptions-amid-2018-election/

Daily OONI network measurements have been collected from Mali for more
than a year, thanks to our local partners. This has allowed us to detect
changes in censorship policies, particularly on the day of Mali's latest
elections.

Our main findings can be summarized as follows:

1. Orange Mali (AS30985)**appears to have blocked access to WhatsApp
(app and web.whatsapp.com), Twitter, guardianproject.info and
anonymizer.ru in the evening of 29th July 2018 (election day). These
platforms had previously been accessible (pretty much) every day over
the last year in this network (strongly suggesting that they were
temporarily blocked).

2. Measurements collected from SOTELMA (AS21271)**don't show signs of
internet censorship on 29th July 2018. Therefore, social media sites
(and circumvention tool sites) weren't blocked by all ISPs on Mali's
election day.

If you're interested in expanding upon this study (particularly as
political events in Mali unfold), you can do so through the use of OONI
Probe (https://ooni.torproject.org/install/) and OONI data
(https://ooni.torproject.org/data/).

Thanks for reading!

All the best,

Maria.****

-- 
Maria Xynou
Research & Partnerships Director
Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI)
https://ooni.torproject.org/
PGP Key Fingerprint: 2DC8 AFB6 CA11 B552 1081 FBDE 2131 B3BE 70CA 417E


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