Of every Citizen Lab content category, LGBTQ+ is one of the most revealing to follow, because blocking it is almost never about “morality” law in the abstract — it targets specific communities and the people who organize them. Ranking countries by how many LGBTQ+-tagged domains they block nationally (confirmed across at least three independent networks), Voidly’s /v1/measurement/category-leaders?category=LGBT finds eight countries doing it at the national level — and the two heaviest are the same two that lead almost every speech category: Russia and Iran.

Who blocks LGBTQ+ content

It’s the local advocates, not just the apps

The pattern in the domain lists matters more than the counts. Two kinds of site get blocked. The first is the global infrastructure of queer life online — dating and community apps like Grindr and Blued, blocked in Iran, Indonesia and Turkey. The second, and more telling, is domestic advocacy: Russia blocks bok-o-bok.com, the site of its own “Side by Side” LGBT film festival; Iran blocks 6rang.org, an Iranian LGBT-rights network; Turkey blocks kaosgl.org, one of the country’s oldest LGBT organizations. A government that only objected to pornography would not need to block the local film festival or the human-rights NGO. Blocking those is censorship of identity and organizing, and it tracks closely with each country’s broader speech-censorship profile (Russia and Iran top the news and human-rights categories too — see the intent-profile finding).

This matches the independent record

Voidly’s reading is not an outlier. The 2021 study “No Access: LGBTIQ Website Censorship in Six Countries” — by OutRight Action International, the Citizen Lab, and OONI (the same measurement network Voidly aggregates) — examined exactly this set of countries and found LGBTIQ-site blocking on 172 distinct networks in Russia, 84 in Iran, and 43 in Indonesia. Crucially, it reported that Iran, Russia and Saudi Arabia block local and regional LGBTIQ sites, not only internationally-known ones — the very “they block the local advocates” pattern Voidly’s confirmed-block data surfaces here, five years later, in the same direction. The policy backdrop has only hardened since: in November 2023 Russia’s Supreme Court branded the “international LGBT movement” extremist, the legal hook under which Roskomnadzor blocks LGBTQ+ content.

Honest caveats

(1) These counts cover only domains carrying Citizen Lab’s LGBTQ+ tag — a curated research list, not an exhaustive census of every queer site, so read the numbers as a floor. (2) China’s absence is a measurement artifact, not tolerance. OONI records the Great Firewall’s interference as “anomaly,” not “confirmed,” so China barely registers in the confirmed national-block layer here despite well- documented blocking of LGBTQ+ content and apps. The leaderboard reliably ranks high-confirmation DNS-poisoning regimes (Russia, Iran), not probabilistic ones. (3) The single-domain entries (India’s pinkcupid.com, the Netherlands’ hrc.org) are thin and likely incidental or measurement false positives, not national LGBTQ+ policy — the meaningful set is the six countries blocking four or more. (4) A “national block” here means a domain confirmed blocked across at least three independent networks in the country; the confirmed layer is a periodic snapshot (see /v1/measurement/freshness). Live: /v1/measurement/category-leaders?category=LGBT.