"democracies" have a separate problem, even if we had true direct democracy (and not representative democracy)- people often conflate what is popular with what is true.

You can see this directly in online forums (including this one), unpopular truths are routinely flagged to the point where it doesn't matter that discussion could have happened, it effectively can't- and not because the points don't make sense or can't be reasoned with... but because it doesn't feel good that it's true.

So, unfortunately, I think censorship is inevitable.. I guess it's better to have censorship from a small group of people for a small group of people instead of having censorship from a small group of people to a nation-wide group of people though.

Scare quoting democracies is probably telling, but OONI absolutely does test content blocked in Western countries. https://explorer.ooni.org/domain/annas-archive.org

Internet blocking is a last resort for regimes that can't do anything against the source of the information or intermediaries, but it's a red herring in regimes that can. Anna's Archive has a political position and is one of the very few voices that survived the immense pressure. How many didn't? How many attempts were not performed at all because of it? This suppression is really hard to measure, OONI can't do anything here, it measures blocking. It's very simple to understand.

The platform is quite open, so you can build whichever tests you want. Personally I run a dockerized ooni via scheduled GitHub actions, which shows blocks impacting GitHub runners. You should be able to see logs from that here, which shows three blocked websites https://github.com/robalexdev/ooni-unattended-action/actions...

You can build your own lists and share them using ooni run: https://run.ooni.org/

Here's my personal benchmark on this public site. Anecdote of 1. Does posting links to these two videos related to health care decisions that were officially approved or denied to people. Get this post... Unalived?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=YmOeKahtmdQ

https://youtube.com/watch?v=FRRX0J_TDXY

If you count platform moderation as 'censorship' then there's practically no uncensored public spaces on the internet.

Literally even 4chan has moderation.

Nobody, not even 4chan users, want an actually unmoderated space.

Not just reddit mods. Google 2013 Eglin Air Force Base incident reddit.

> old Twitter decided to censor a NYPost article

Again, which article, about what subject?

howunfortunate didn't answer, just deflected:

> Are there NYPost articles you feel people should be prevented from DMing? Or posting, for that matter?

qerghnui's reply was flagged to death:

> Why do you refuse to answer the question?

> The story you are referring to involved the New York Post or its affiliates breaking in to Hunter Biden's laptop (a felony) and publishing his personal correspondence, complete with unredacted phone numbers and email addresses. This violated Twitter's policies against doxxing and dissemination of hacked materials. Characterizing this as censorship is misleading; the story contained no newsworthy information and its publication violated longstanding Twitter policy. It's hard to imagine Twitter functioning without such a policy. I don't see any reason the New York Post should get away with violating it just because it claims to be a newspaper.

> The Wall Street Journal, a Murdoch rag like the Post and hardly known for its liberal bias, declined to publish this information, which is why it wound up in the disreputable Post instead. Respectable journalists have ethical standards. Act like thugs, get treated like thugs.

> P.S. Twitter is free to make whatever editorial decisions it pleases. Trying to make them publish something they don't want to publish is compelled speech. Compelling speech in the name of freedom of speech is hypocritical.

As a thought exercise, could it be captured?

Do they distinguish between "censored in transit" and "blocked by destination"?

In the last years many sites started to drop/block connections from the countries like China and Russia. It is sad to see how Internet is becoming more and more fragmented.

I would love to contribute, but i do not think it is a good idea to install and run this in China…enough said. Also i already know the outcome: network is fast, everything is blocked

It's part of nixpkgs so I tried it out. I killed the process when it started writing something big to my disk. Why is it doing that?

Many of the partners are country focused but the Tor Project, Citizen Lab, and Internet Society are well known to me.