5/24/22, 7:49 PM Myanmar blocks “fake news” websites amid COVID-19 pandemic | OONI Image: Block page hosted on the IP 59.153.90.11. While we were not able to confirm the blocking on the Myanma Posts and Telecommunications (AS9988) network, we observe that DNS requests to these sites consistently fail, strongly suggesting that the sites (listed in the appendix) are also blocked on this network. We also analyzed OONI measurements collected from Myanmar prior to January 2020 (between 2017 to the end of 2019), but we did not find any significant blockages, suggesting that the censorship events discussed in this study only emerged over the last few months. However, the findings are limited by the relatively limited volume of collected measurements and the fact that many of the blocked sites were only added to the Citizen Lab’s test list for Myanmar in recent months. Blocked news outlets In February 2020, the Myanmar Press Council released a press statement including a list of sites viewed as spreading “fake news”. The remarks in this press release accuse most of these sites of copyright infringement. Since the recent (aforementioned) blocking directive included many “fake news” sites, we decided to compare the news sites that we confirmed blocked as part of our analysis with the news sites listed as “fake news” by the Myanmar Press Council. The following table does this comparison, as it includes the news outlets that we found blocked (providing relevant OONI measurements), along with a note on whether each of them was listed as a “fake news” site by the Myanmar Press Council. Blocked domains Listed as “fake OONI measurements news” www.dmgburmese.com No https://explorer.ooni.org/search?until=2020-05 06&domain=www.dmgburmese.com&probe_cc= www.narinjara.com No https://explorer.ooni.org/search?until=2020-05 06&domain=www.narinjara.com&probe_cc=MM karennews.org No https://explorer.ooni.org/search?until=2020-05 06&domain=karennews.org&probe_cc=MM www.vom-news.com No https://explorer.ooni.org/search?until=2020-05 06&domain=www.vom-news.com&probe_cc=M https://ooni.org/post/2020-myanmar-blocks-websites-amid-covid19/ 5/14