During summer 2015, it came to the attention of our team that McDonalds were actively censoring websites on their in-store tablet devices by redirecting users to the McDonald’s homepage whenever a blocked website was encountered.

After using these tablets at a number of outlets over a period of 10 days, we put together the below video, containing a snapshot of just a few of the websites we found being censored.

We carried out these tests with undercover filming crews at a number of McDonalds outlets in the UK. We found the censorship was not isolated to any particular restaurant or franchisee.

With the exception of the Wikipedia entry, every website we tested in relation to bitcoin (bitcoin.org, coindesk, weusecoins etc.) was subject to censorship.

In addition, EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), Greenpeace and the Financial Times were also censored, although the Times, Wall Street Journal, Forbes and a number of other newspaper sites functioned on the tablets as expected.

There was no clear filtering pattern that we could discern: it could not be argued that sites featuring adult content/language were being blocked, since many of the censored websites did not fit into this category and a number of websites that had no block (such as the Guardian) regularly feature adult language.

We later made our purpose known at one location, and then contacted a trusted representative of one media outlet in the UK, as well as a number of UK politicians.

What we discovered next was truly chilling, and will be the subject of subsequent releases.

In the meantime you can help us by spreading this message and conducting your own investigation at your nearest McDonalds restaurant…

Use the hashtag #McCensored to post your findings to social media.

“The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.” — George Bernard Shaw

Video music credits: “McDonalds For The Mind” (Nathan Ball / Jez Hellard and the Djukella Orchestra)

UPDATE 1: A few days after we began releasing information, we observed that the website filtering had ceased at one London based restaurant location. We are yet to ascertain if the removal of the redirects is an anomaly particular to this restaurant or a software glitch at the time of testing, or whether this has been rolled out across the entire McDonalds network. If the latter, then we can hail this as a victory for freedom of speech, although we have barely begun to peer down the rabbit hole…More updates to come.