Some politically active bloggers in the studied country deliberately continued publishing on officially court-blocked platforms, reasoning that official blockage created a legal defense against persecution: 'if they say you wrote this on your blog, I will say all of these blogs are blocked according to this court decision—they don't exist and they are officially inaccessible to citizens.' This co-option of censor infrastructure as a shield was treated as a serious protective strategy.

A politically active blogger in an anonymized censored country explicitly avoided BlackBerry encryption stating: 'they can't crack that encryption and they would just get suspicious. Cause they listen to me and listen to me and then suddenly I am encrypting and so that means I am really saying something they don't want me to.' This documents censor behavior where the mere use of strong encryption—independent of content—serves as a targeting signal.

§Blocked sites as a form of protection policy

Blocking in the studied country was erratic and inconsistent: some geographic areas accessed the Internet through channels outside the main government-controlled pipeline and experienced no blocking, while other areas experienced sudden unexplained block-and-unblock cycles (e.g., a video sharing site and a microblogging site were blocked for 2-3 days in 2010 and then unblocked without explanation). Users frequently could not distinguish between deliberate blocking and ordinary technical outages, and this ambiguity itself amplified self-censorship among users who had not been directly targeted.

§Blocking as an Abstract Concept / National Internet space policy

Forum and blog platform operators in the censored country were systematically coerced into serving as first-line censorship enforcers: they monitored user comments, warned users that Internet anonymity did not exist, gave users chances to self-remove offending posts, and ultimately handed user identifying information to government agencies when users did not comply. Larger forums hired full-time moderators operating 24 hours a day to manage this compliance workload.

§Forum owner and platform provider strategies policy

Users lacking technical circumvention skills bypassed blocking via social relays: technically savvy friends or contacts in unblocked regions copied blocked content into email or reposted it on social network profiles, allowing censored information to reach users who had no direct access to proxies or anonymizers. This informal bypass required no circumvention software on the recipient's end.

§Reliance on social ties policy

The June 2025 Iran shutdown—carried out during the Iran-Israel war beginning ~June 19—did not use BGP route withdrawals as in 2019. Instead, authorities applied service-level restrictions at the national border: DNS poisoning of foreign destinations, protocol whitelisting permitting only pre-approved domestic services, and DPI to block circumvention-tool traffic. Iran's international traffic fell roughly 90% while the country's BGP routes remained advertised, making the shutdown invisible to BGP-based monitoring systems. OONI measurement volume, which totalled 121,333 in June 2025, collapsed to under 200 submissions on June 19-20.

2025-iran-shutdown-measurement Executive Summary / §2 dpidns-poisoningport-blockingip-blocking

Chinese users treat full proxy/VPN (Shadowsocks, V2Ray/Clash, commercial VPNs) as the '终极大杀器' (ultimate solution) for bypassing GitHub DNS poisoning, implying that lighter-weight DNS-only fixes fail in some network environments where the censor adds firewall-layer blocking beyond DNS.

2026-anon-6-github-dns §3 使用代理或 VPN dns-poisoningip-blocking

Rule-based proxy tools (Clash, Shadowsocks, V2Ray) are documented as the most reliable solution for accessing GitHub from China, with split-tunneling rules routing only GitHub traffic through the proxy while keeping domestic traffic on the direct path. Git command-line tools require explicit proxy configuration (git config --global http.proxy http://127.0.0.1:7890) to route clone/push operations, as they do not inherit system proxy settings automatically.

2026-anon-github-2026-6-dns §方法二 dns-poisoningip-blocking

The GFW blocks GitHub via DNS poisoning across at least four domains — github.com, assets-cdn.github.com, github.global.ssl.fastly.net, and raw.githubusercontent.com — causing connection timeouts and page-load failures for mainland China users. The block is persistent as of February 2026, affecting both browser access and command-line git operations.

2026-anon-github-2026-6-dns Introduction / §方法一 dns-poisoningip-blocking

Article 19 documents that Iran's National Information Network (NIN / SHOMA) was designed with explicit reference to China's Great Firewall as a model, with institutional mirroring: Iran's Supreme Council of Cyberspace parallels China's Cyberspace Administration of China, and both governments share a "cyber sovereignty" doctrine used to justify domestic content controls and cross-border technology transfer. The report frames Iran's filtering infrastructure as deliberately architected to replicate GFW capabilities, not as an independently developed system.

2026-article19-tightening-the-net §2, §3 dpisni-blockingdns-poisoningip-blockingbgp-hijackthrottling

Article 19 documents that Iran combines technical filtering with formal coercion of major foreign platforms (including Telegram, Instagram, and WhatsApp) to comply with content removal orders under threat of full blocking. The report notes that Iran's 2022 Women Life Freedom protests accelerated platform blocking when foreign operators refused compliance, demonstrating that the censorship system operates in two modes: coerce-and-allow for compliant platforms, block for non-compliant ones. Domain fronting via these platforms is therefore subject to sudden revocation if political conditions change.

2026-article19-tightening-the-net §6 ip-blockingdns-poisoningthrottling