The confirmed-block map is a measurement map: why Africa shows zero

Aggregate Voidly's confirmed national blocks by world region and you get a striking table: Asia 1,545, Europe 891, the Americas 29, Africa and Oceania ZERO. The tempting read — 'Africa barely censors' — is wrong. The confirmed-block map is not a censorship map, it's a measurement-density map. The contradiction is in Africa's own row: a 0.60 block fraction across 28 countries and 4,600+ measurements (blocking is plainly observed) yet zero CONFIRMED national blocks. A confirmed national block requires a domain seen blocked across >=3 independent networks (ASNs) in a country — a gate that keeps one flaky vantage point from being mistaken for nationwide censorship, but can only confirm what is densely measured. Where a country is probed from only one or two networks, a very real block never reaches three ASNs, so it stays an unconfirmed signal. Asia and Europe top the table partly because they're the most censored — but also the most heavily measured (dense coverage across many networks per country). Africa and Oceania sit at zero not because their internet is free, but because the multi-network coverage needed to confirm a block at the three-ASN bar isn't there yet. Read confirmed-block counts as a floor on what we can prove, never a ranking of how censored a region is — the blind spots are blind spots, not freedom. An observatory that let '0 confirmed' read as '0 censorship' would erase exactly the regions with the least measurement infrastructure. So Voidly reports block fraction + country coverage alongside the confirmed count, and is widening density: the probe network recently expanded from a 62-domain default to the full Citizen Lab list across dozens of global vantage points. Live: /v1/measurement/by-region.