Censorship twins: Iran and Russia block the same human-rights groups and the same VPNs

Compare the national blocklists of every pair of countries Voidly measures and one pair stands far above the rest. Iran and Russia — the two heaviest speech-censors in the corpus — share 135 nationally-blocked domains (each confirmed across >=3 independent networks), and on the politically meaningful slice the gap is starker: they share 23 of the same news/human-rights domains where the next-closest country pair shares just 5 (a 4.6x gap on the content that matters). 'Convergence' means the two blocklists independently land on the same targets, not that either copied the other; WHAT they land on and HOW RARE it is elsewhere is the story. Of the 135, 23 are news/human-rights sites reading like a directory of the press-freedom movement: amnesty.org (Amnesty International), cpj.org (Committee to Protect Journalists), article19.org, hrw.org (Human Rights Watch), freedomhouse.org, fidh.org, dw.com (Deutsche Welle), bbc.com, euronews.com. Another 25 are VPN/anti-censorship tools: expressvpn.com, cyberghostvpn.com, hide.me, hotspotshield.com, lantern.io, getoutline.org, and bridges.torproject.org — the Tor bridge-distribution endpoint built specifically to survive national blocking. Is this just coincidence (many countries block popular sites)? The data rules that out: at the confirmed national-block layer (>=3 independent networks), amnesty.org, cpj.org, article19.org, expressvpn.com and torproject.org each clear that bar in EXACTLY TWO countries, both times Iran and Russia. (Voidly's looser per-domain view /data/domain/<d> lists more/different countries for some because it counts any single blocking ISP over a rolling 7-day window, including transient single-network false positives the three-network gate filters out — the confirmed layer is the rigorous one.) These are rare, specific targets, and the same two governments reached them: convergence on the precise infrastructure of dissent and circumvention, not a coincidence of popularity. HONEST CAVEATS: convergence is NOT proof of coordination/copying — parallel independent targeting of the obvious dissident infrastructure is the conservative explanation (and alarming enough); 'blocked in only two countries' is within Voidly's measured corpus (uneven coverage, a floor not a global census); China is absent as a MEASUREMENT ARTIFACT (GFW=anomaly not confirmed), not because it permits Amnesty or VPNs; the pairwise Jaccard (0.107) looks small only because each blocklist is large — the signal is the political/tooling overlap and its rarity; confirmed layer is a periodic snapshot. CORROBORATION (each half, separately): Russia's Roskomnadzor blocked Amnesty International's Russian site in March 2022 + HRW + RFE/RL (Amnesty; Freedom House FOTN 2024); Iran's DNS-tampering blocks of human-rights/women's-rights sites are long documented (OONI; Freedom House). Honest nuance: an OONI 2014-17 study found Amnesty still REACHABLE in Iran then — so Iran's block is RECENT, exactly what Voidly's 2026 confirmed data captures (different timelines = convergence, not a shared playbook). Live: /v1/measurement/co-blocking.