What is Internet Censorship ?

Internet Censorship is the control or suppression of what can be accessed, viewed or published on the internet. The concerned governments or the regulators may carry it out. While the persons and organizations may hold the self-censorship for the religious, business or the moral reasons. The committee to for the protection of the journalists (CPI) has registered that in several Asian countries and the Middle East, the information is submitted to the censorship by their governments. In some cases, the dictatorships or the totalitarian governments are restricting the access to this media and enforcing prison as the punishment for uploading any ambiguous information to the personal websites.

The extent of internet censorship varies by a nation to nation. Besides the most democratic countries of the world have the moderate internet censorship while the other countries go as far as to limit the access of information such as suppress discussion and the news among the citizens of that nations. Below is a list of top 10 countries that censor the internet, where the blogging actions are considered risky and where you can get in serious trouble for doing so.

List of Top 10 Countries With Internet Censorship 2015 Rankings

10.Turkmenistan

In Turkmenistan, numerous people considered the internet as a luxury because of its uppermost cost. It is a policy used by the government to discourage people from using it. The government is the only internet service provider in Turkmenistan. It blocks the access to many websites while monitoring all the email accounts in Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail. Also, the government blocks the websites relating to human rights organizations and news agencies. A single attempt to break out the censorship could lead to the grave penalty.

9. Vietnam

The Vietnam government has asked Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and many other websites to provide all the particulars of the bloggers that are using their platform. Also, the government has created an agency just to monitor the uploaded information and blocking websites, which are critical to the Vietnamese government. Besides, the Vietnamese government also blocks the websites relating to International human rights and political parties.

8. Tunisia

In Tunisia, the internet service providers are required to submit a report to their government containing the IP addresses and personal information of bloggers on the regular basis. It is only to make sure that they are recognized and under instant watch. All the traffic goes through the central net with which the government filters all the uploaded data and monitors the emails. Moreover, Tunisia has blocked thousands of websites relating to pornography, mail, search engine cached pages, online documents, peer-to-peer and FTP transfer, conversion and translation services.

7. Syria



In Syria, the Syrian government arrests any blogger who expresses any anti-governmental thought or any view that may put at risk for the national unity. Moreover, the websites that are criticizing the government are also blocked immediately. The owners of cyber cafes are compelled to ask all their customers for recognition, their registered name, and time of their usage and report them to the concerned authorities.In addition to filter a wide range of web content, the Syrian government monitors the internet usage very deeply and has arrested the citizens for expressing their opinions or reporting information online.

6. China



China is the most populated country in the world. It has the most inflexible censorship program in the world. It counts with the service providers that filter the searches, block websites, erase any tiresome content and monitor the emails traffic. China blocks and filters the Internet content relating to the Tibetan and Taiwan independence, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, police brutality, freedom of speech, some international news, pornography, propaganda outlets, religious movements and much other blogging websites in China.

5. Iran

The bloggers who challenge to criticize the government or any religious or political figure are arrested and harassed. In Iran, every person having a blog or a personal web page is required to be registered with the ministry of art and culture. The Government has filtered the websites having the content dangerous for the government, political blogs, pornography sites, women’s rights websites, weblogs and the online magazines.

4. Saudi Arabia



In a recent few years, the Saudi Government has blocked more than 4,00,000 websites including any website that board political, religious or social topics. In 2004, the Open Net Initiative made a research revealing that Saudi Arabia has the most violent censorship focused on the pornography, drug usage, gambling, religious conversion of Muslims and the filtering circumvention tools.

3. Cuba

Cuba has the lowest ratio of the computers per capita in the Latin America, and the least internet access ratio of the entire western hemisphere. Cuba government gives the right to use the Internet to people through the specific access points that are monitoring through the IP blocking, browsing history and keyword filtering. Here only pro-governmental bloggers and employees are authorized to upload data on the internet.

2. Burma

The censorship of printed and audiovisual media. Burma has a minimum internet access in the civil life, which is deeply monitored by the government, and it has the duty to filter the emails and block the access to the human rights groups and opposition group websites.

1. North Korea

In the ranking list of top 10 most internet censored countries, North Korea holds the first spot since In North Korea, only 4% population have the access to the internet, which is deeply censored by the national government.The North Korean network in monitored deeply by only two websites being hosted under a domain name. Same like other media, all the websites are also in the control of North Korean government because here uploading is not allowed to all the inhabitants.So all the data is uploaded and approved by the government.

Internet Censorship by Country 2015 Ranking List

Rank Most Internet Censored Countries Capital 1. North Korea Pyongyang 2. Burma Naypyidaw 3. Cuba Havana 4. Saudi Arabia Riyadh 5. Iran Tehran 6. China Beijing 7. Syria Damascus 8. Tunisia Tunis 9. Vietnam Hanoi 10. Turkmenistan Ashgabat

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