Censored continent: understanding the use of tools during information controls in Africa: Nigeria, Cameroon, Uganda, and Zimbabwe as case studies.

Between 2019 and 2020, The Tor Project has had the opportunity to serve as the host organization of OTF Information Controls Fellow, Babatunde Okunoye. Today, we are sharing here the publication of his research report, titled "Censored continent: understanding the use of tools during Information controls in Africa: Nigeria, Cameroon, Uganda, and Zimbabwe as case studies."
As part of his fellowship, Babatunde examined the use of Internet censorship circumvention tools in Cameroon, Nigeria, Uganda, and Zimbabwe, four countries in Africa with varying degrees of Internet censorship, including Internet bandwidth throttling, social media app restrictions, and website blocks. Interviews were done with 33 people, including students, civil society members, people in business, and teachers, revealing how communities mobilized to defeat censorship.
Important findings include:
- Civil society played an important role in mobilizing people to use circumvention tools.
- Some of the most important VPN adoption reasons were community recommendations, cost of use, and ease of use.
- Messaging apps like Signal and Telegram, which were unknown to government censors and were not blocked, served as alternative messaging channels when more popular apps like Facebook and WhatsApp were blocked.
- People used innovative means of sharing VPNs, such as through USBs and Bluetooth, when downloads were no longer possible from official sources such as websites of VPN makers and smartphone App stores.
Full-length report:
https://research.torproject.org/techreports/icfp-censored-continent-202…
Media impact:
https://www.cfr.org/blog/technologies-freedom-enabling-democracy-africa
His research in the field helped us to inform the user research work on improving Tor Browser as an essential circumvention tool.
If you have questions or comments regarding this study, you can reach out to Babatunde directly: to.csgroups[at]gmail.com.
Fascinating. What about…
Fascinating. What about Kenya, CAR, DRC, etc?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenya
https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2020/country-chapters/kenya
(Many recent incidents of harrasment of dissidents, bloggers, and human rights groups by government officials).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_African_Republic
https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2020/country-chapters/central-african-…
(Political violence directed at disparaged subpopulations, human rights workers, etc.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Republic_of_the_Congo
https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/07/08/justice-risk-democratic-republic-co…
(Courts in danger of being "captured" by special interests, a familiar story, etc.)
Enabling women to access good information and protecting children from surveillance capitalism are two closely related issues of importance all over the world including Africa.
Also, it would be interesting to study how Tor promotes/retards the spread of QAnon and David Icke paranoid conspiracy theories, which are rapidly spreading all over the world--- particularly, it seems, among women (see previous sentence).
If corporate sponsors are so fab, why doesn't Google or a satellite communications startup help TP bring uncensorable internet to refugee camps? (Whatever happened to Google's widely publicized balloon project? It was supposed to help dissidents but seems to have morphed into yet another technical surveillance program in what the US DOJ calls "anarchist jurisdictions" such as Seattle.)
Harambee!
> People used innovative means of sharing VPNs, such as through USBs and Bluetooth, when downloads were no longer possible from official sources such as websites of VPN makers and smartphone App stores.
Perhaps there is a lesson there for TP itself: offer to communicate via OnionShare, not just (inherently insecure and non-anonymous) email?