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Findings — surprising signals in our censorship dataset

14 headline-grade research findings, mined automatically from 2,021 citable incidents and 59,072 underlying measurements across 130 countries. Every finding cites the API call it came from. Free under CC BY 4.0.

14
live findings
2,021
incidents
59K
evidence rows
130
countries

generated Sun, 26 Apr 2026 12:19:52 GMT · earliest record: 2016-07-15

New report · April 2026

AI Services Censorship Report — April 2026

ChatGPT and Gemini are hard-blocked in China; Claude is reachable. Russia interferes with all five major Western AI services. 3,604 OONI events across 74 countries.

Read the report →

Top findings

Each card has a permalink and a copyable BibTeX/RIS citation. Numbers are computed at request time from public APIs.

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F01Methodology#

2,021 citable censorship incidents documented across 130+ countries

Voidly maintains the largest open, machine-readable corpus of internet censorship incidents — 59.1K pieces of evidence linked to specific outages, blocking events and disruptions, each with a permanent ID and citation.

2,021
incidents
59.1K
evidence rows
+447
new this week
+4691/day
evidence growth
How we computed this

Counted from the live incidents table on api.voidly.ai. "Evidence rows" are the underlying OONI / IODA / CensoredPlanet measurements linked to each incident.

$ curl "https://api.voidly.ai/data/incidents/stats"
GET /data/incidents/statsView open data hub →
F02Events#

Newest detected event: Uzbekistan — Internet connectivity disruption in Uzbekistan

Voidly's pipeline ingests new evidence every two hours. The most recent incident in the database started 1h ago (2026-04-26T10:40:00.000Z). Severity: critical; sources: ioda.

1h ago
detected
UZ-2026-0058
incident id
critical
severity
ioda
sources
How we computed this

Sorted live incidents API by start_time descending, took row 0. Time-ago is computed at request time.

$ curl "https://api.voidly.ai/data/incidents?limit=1"
GET /data/incidents?limit=1Open incident →
F03Censorship#

China leads global censorship rankings (score 68 / 100); 1 countries classified high or severe

Voidly's continuous live index ranks 130 countries on a 0-100 censorship score, derived from network-level test outcomes (DNS, TCP, TLS, HTTP). Countries scoring 70+ are classified "severe", 50-69 "high".

1
high or severe
68
#1 China
28
#2 Russia
21
#3 Cuba
How we computed this

Score is a weighted blend of block rate, breadth (how many distinct services), method severity, and network-test agreement across OONI / CensoredPlanet / probes.

$ curl "https://api.voidly.ai/data/censorship-index.json"
GET /data/censorship-index.jsonView full index →
F04Predictive#

10 countries currently exceed Voidly's 7-day shutdown-risk threshold; Iran sits highest

Voidly Sentinel's XGBoost forecast (AUC 0.98, conformal coverage 0.905) projects per-country probability of a major connectivity event in the next 7 days. Threshold-crossing countries trigger HMAC-signed webhook alerts to subscribers within minutes.

8.9%
Iran 7-day risk
8.9%
Iran
8.1%
Lebanon
6.6%
Turkey
6.4%
Ethiopia
How we computed this

XGBoost classifier trained on 1.6M historical OONI records + IODA outage labels + event calendar. Output is calibrated via isotonic regression; threshold is set to the 90th percentile of historical false-positive rates.

$ curl "https://api.voidly.ai/v1/sentinel/global_heatmap?min_risk=0"
GET /v1/sentinel/global_heatmapSee risk briefings →
F05Platforms#

Twitter / X is the most-targeted platform globally — blocking evidence in 38 countries

Voidly aggregates per-platform measurements across 12 services (messengers, social, multimedia, search). Twitter / X consistently leads as the most-blocked service, followed by encrypted messengers Signal and Telegram.

38
countries with evidence
38
Twitter / X
30
Signal
30
TikTok
29
YouTube
How we computed this

Counted as DISTINCT country_code in evidence rows where signal_type indicates blocking and the test target maps to the platform. A platform is "blocked" in a country if at least one measurement shows interference.

$ curl "https://api.voidly.ai/v1/platforms/scores"
GET /v1/platforms/scoresSee full platform table →
F06Privacy#

Encrypted messaging is under pressure: 30+ countries show blocking of Signal, WhatsApp or Telegram

Across the three major end-to-end-encrypted consumer messengers, Voidly has found blocking evidence in dozens of countries. Telegram leads as the most-blocked, followed by Signal and WhatsApp.

30
countries (max of any messenger)
26
WhatsApp
28
Telegram
30
Signal
How we computed this

Filtered the platform-scores API to {signal, telegram, whatsapp} and reported the count of distinct countries with blocking evidence per messenger.

$ curl "https://api.voidly.ai/v1/platforms/scores"
GET /v1/platforms/scoresView platform risk scores →
F07Network#

41 active probes ran 2.2K measurements across 78 domains in the last cycle

Voidly operates a global probe network that tests a curated list of domains every 5 minutes. Across the most recent batch, 4.9% of attempts were blocked or interfered with. The network spans 18 countries and 5 detected blocking methods.

41
active nodes
2.2K
probes
78
domains tested
18
countries covered
4.9%
block rate
How we computed this

Live aggregate of the probe network. "Block rate" = blocked_count / total_probes from the last fetched probe stats payload.

$ curl "https://api.voidly.ai/v1/probe/stats"
GET /v1/probe/statsSee probe network →
F08Methodology#

Voidly probes detect 5 distinct blocking techniques in active deployment

Censorship infrastructure varies in technique. Voidly's probes classify each blocked attempt into one of: http-redirect, dns-poisoned, tcp-refused, tcp-timeout, tcp-reset. Method diversity matters because blocking techniques imply different mitigation strategies (e.g. encrypted DNS defeats DNS poisoning but not TCP reset).

5
methods detected
http-redirect
technique
dns-poisoned
technique
tcp-refused
technique
tcp-timeout
technique
tcp-reset
technique
How we computed this

The probe agent classifies each failed connection by signal: NXDOMAIN/poisoned-A → "dns-poisoned"; RST → "tcp-reset"; timeout → "tcp-timeout"; HTTP 30x with self-redirect → "http-redirect"; etc.

$ curl "https://api.voidly.ai/v1/probe/stats"
GET /v1/probe/statsRead methodology →
F09Growth#

RU leads cumulative incident count with 46 documented events

Voidly's top-5 most-active jurisdictions for documented censorship and disruption events. Rank reflects cumulative count across the live archive, not necessarily current severity.

46
RU incidents
46
RU
45
NG
43
IR
43
TT
40
VE
How we computed this

Top countries are returned directly by the stats endpoint, ordered by total incident count in the live database.

$ curl "https://api.voidly.ai/data/incidents/stats"
GET /data/incidents/statsView RU country page →
F10Censorship#

96.8% of all documented incidents are classified critical-severity

Voidly grades each incident on a three-tier severity scale (info / warning / critical) using a confidence-weighted rule combining blocking method, scope (number of services / ASNs), and corroborating sources.

96.8%
critical-severity share
2K
critical
65
warning
How we computed this

Sum of incidents grouped by severity = total. critical / total × 100 is the critical share. Warnings are typically transient probe-level interference; criticals span multiple measurements or sources.

$ curl "https://api.voidly.ai/data/incidents/stats"
GET /data/incidents/statsSee severity rubric →
F11Topics#

7 countries have severe or high censorship of women's health and group-rights content

Filtered to Citizen Lab category WMN/GRP, this topic isolates censorship of reproductive health and gender-related information. China ranks highest.

7
severe + high countries
100
China
67
Iran
67
Russia
How we computed this

Topic filter restricts the censorship index to evidence rows whose blocked domains map to the WMN or GRP Citizen Lab category. Country scores are then recomputed within that subset.

$ curl "https://api.voidly.ai/data/censorship-index.json?topic=women-health"
GET /data/censorship-index.json?topic=women-healthSee per-topic breakdown →
F12Topics#

Press freedom under threat: 3 countries severely restrict access to news websites

Filtered to Citizen Lab category NEWS, this topic shows where independent and international news outlets face network-level blocking. China leads with a topic-specific score of 100.

3
severe + high countries
100
China
65
Iran
61
Russia
How we computed this

Topic filter restricts the censorship index to evidence rows whose blocked domains carry the NEWS Citizen Lab category. Score is the same blend (block rate × breadth × method severity) computed within the subset.

$ curl "https://api.voidly.ai/data/censorship-index.json?topic=news"
GET /data/censorship-index.json?topic=newsSee per-topic breakdown →
F13Privacy#

8 countries actively block circumvention tools (VPNs, Tor, proxies)

When a regime moves to block circumvention tools — VPN providers, Tor bridges, or anti-censorship proxies — it signals a maturation of censorship infrastructure. China ranks highest in this topic.

8
severe + high countries
100
China
80
Iran
73
Egypt
How we computed this

Topic filter restricts to circumvention-related domains (vpn, tor, anonymizer categories). Score is recomputed against just those domains.

$ curl "https://api.voidly.ai/data/censorship-index.json?topic=circumvention"
GET /data/censorship-index.json?topic=circumventionSee per-topic breakdown →
F14Methodology#

Voidly aggregates 2.2B+ raw OONI measurements (aggregated source) into a single live API

The dataset behind these findings combines 401.5K live measurements over the last 30 days with a 1.6M historical record archive going back 2016-07-15. Updated every 6 hours.

401.5K
live measurements (30d window)
1.6M
historical records
130
countries
0.998 (internal 5-fold cross-validation)
model F1
How we computed this

Numbers are read directly from the metadata field of the live censorship-index payload. The 6-hour refresh comes from the cron job that regenerates ooni-data.json from the source DB.

$ curl "https://api.voidly.ai/data/censorship-index.json"
GET /data/censorship-index.json (metadata field)See methodology →

Data overview

New incidents in our recent sample

Counted from the most recent 200 incidents returned by /data/incidents. Pipeline activity, not absolute volume.

26-04
200

Evidence sources

Voidly cross-checks signals from multiple independent measurement networks.

ooni30,355 (51.4%)
ioda16,958 (28.7%)
censoredplanet11,759 (19.9%)

Reproduce any finding

Each finding above can be reproduced with a single curl. The full pipeline — ingestion, scoring, storage — is documented and the underlying data is open. Use the “How we computed this” expander on each card for the exact API call.

# All incidents (paginated, JSON)
curl "https://api.voidly.ai/data/incidents?limit=200"
# Stats summary (totals, growth, by-severity)
curl "https://api.voidly.ai/data/incidents/stats"
# 7-day shutdown forecast (Voidly Sentinel)
curl "https://api.voidly.ai/v1/sentinel/global_heatmap?min_risk=0"
API docs →·Methodology →·Open data hub →·RSS feed →·HuggingFace dataset →
Press / journalists

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Email press@voidly.aiFor journalistsPress kit

All findings released under CC BY 4.0 · cite as voidly.ai/findings · last refresh Sun, 26 Apr 2026 12:19:52 GMT