Net censorship

2014-10-07 — 2026-02-14

Wherein the machinery of web suppression is catalogued by the Lumen project, and takedown and cease‑and‑desist notices are recorded, including notices originating from states such as Turkey.

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Figure 1

Notes on interesting cases of hiding bits of the net from the public.

1 Turkey’s herculean efforts

Noticeable last time I was there. Turkish censorship strategies Turkey’s Erdogan: One of the World’s Most Determined Internet Censors.

2 Tracking censorship

Lumen Database:

Lumen is an independent research project studying cease and desist letters concerning online content. We collect and analyse requests to remove material from the web. Our goals are to educate the public, to facilitate research about the different kinds of complaints and requests for removal—both legitimate and questionable—that are being sent to Internet publishers and service providers, and to provide as much transparency as possible about the “ecology” of such notices, in terms of who is sending them and why, and to what effect.

3 Great Firewall of China

See China for more on this.

4 More expansive definitions of censorship

Does shadow-banning go here? Cancelling?