Jun 21, 2008

Social Media Websites Banned Worldwide

world map

According to the recent World Information Access report, since 2003, “64 citizens unaffiliated with news organizations have been arrested for their blogging activities”. But it’s not just individual bloggers who are under threat. There have been numerous attempts by governments to censor social media sites. Using IBM’s ManyEyes tool, we’ve created a map of the most censored websites around the world.

You can find the World Information Access report here [PDF] [via]

Unfortunately, this list is probably only the tip of the iceberg. Most of the reports of censorship are based on stories by major news outlets. If we have missed any sites or countries then please leave a link in the comments section to an article with more details so we can update the map.

Also, please feel free to embed the map on your own site. You don’t need to attribute a link to this site, but it would be nice if you could link to one of the following sites:

globalvoicesonline.org
committeetoprotectbloggers.org

We only looked at platforms and not individual sites. While some of the sites are no longer banned, we thought it was better to include any that have been banned previously.

Click on the map below to interact with it. (You can also use the ManyEyes tool to update the data yourself).

Here is a table listing which sites have been banned by each country. The most censored site was YouTube where we found reports of nine countries that had censored the site over the last few years.

Country	Banned Websites
Brazil	YouTube, Wordpress
China	YouTube, Wikipedia
Ethiopia	Blogger
India	Blogger
Indonesia	YouTube, MySpace
Iran	Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia, Orkut
Morocco	YouTube
Pakistan	YouTube, Blogger, Wikipedia
Saudi Arabia	Flickr, Orkut
Syria	Facebook
Thailand	YouTube
Turkey	YouTube, Wordpress
United Arab Emirates	Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Orkut

List of sources for each site below:

If you have any details of other sites that have been banned then please leave a link in the comments section and we’ll try to update it other the next few days. You can also use and add to the data if you sign-up to ManyEyes.

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zahra

Hi
I’m from Iran

Wikipedia not filtered in Iran
please correct your list.

[reply to this comment]

Jun 23rd, 2008
projectlib

Hi…I’m in Thailand

Youtube is blocked by some ISP not all…
I can see youtube some ISP…

Thank you

[reply to this comment]

Jun 24th, 2008
Jackson

Nice overview. Thanks for putting this together. It’s interesting to which countries fear free speech.

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Jul 2nd, 2008
Martin

Why blogger and wikipedia have been banned? I am confused to know that. Youtube has some serious issues so no wonders on that.

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Jul 7th, 2008
Expat in Morocco

You should check out your sources. YouTube was banned in Morocco for a short period only. It is alive and well for more than a year now here. Please don’t spread disinfo, do some homework before posting. What’s banned in Morocco? Google Earth. Why? I would like to know that too.

[reply to this comment]

Jul 9th, 2008
admin

@zahra, @projectlib @Expat in Morocco. As the article says:

“While some of the sites are no longer banned, we thought it was better to include any that have been banned previously.”

The article doesn’t claim that any of those sites are banned now, just that they have been banned previously. I think @Expat in Morocco your accusation of spreading “disinfo” is unjustified as we link to the sources that the map is based on.

Thanks for all your comments.

[reply to this comment]

Jul 9th, 2008
Smart Marketing Expert

Note: Off the top of my head.

China: sensor Google
France: Filtering Yahoo at one time

I am sure there are more, brain tired for now

[reply to this comment]

Jul 17th, 2008
projectlib

Thank you admin I’m understand it… ^-^

[reply to this comment]

Jul 21st, 2008
MANISH

orkut site is banned in india.. when i go to the web page it says the site is banned..

[reply to this comment]

Jul 23rd, 2008
MANISH

orkut is banned in india…pls do something..

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Jul 23rd, 2008
Cleverneutron

youtube was banned in Indonesia in a short time, but now it works fine

[reply to this comment]

Aug 11th, 2008
zazo

Manish, Orkut is not Banned in India, nor Blogger.

[reply to this comment]

Aug 25th, 2008
Tom

I think this goes against the basic rights of webs. I don’t know why they do so but it is not a right thing.

[reply to this comment]

Aug 26th, 2008