9/24/21, 8:39 PM The State of Internet Censorship in Myanmar | OONI ranging from news media, file sharing and culture, to provocative or objectionable categories, like pornography, political criticism, and hate speech. These categories help ensure that a wide range of different types of websites are tested, and they enable the examination of the impact of censorship events (for example, if the majority of the websites found to be blocked in a country fall under the “human rights” category, that may have a bigger impact than other types of websites being blocked elsewhere). The main reason why objectionable categories (such as “pornography” and “hate speech”) are included for testing is because they are more likely to be blocked due to their nature, enabling the development of heuristics for detecting censorship elsewhere within a country. In addition to testing the URLs included in the global test list, OONI Probe is also designed to examine a test list which is specifically created for the country that the user is running OONI Probe from, if such a list exists. Unlike the global test list, country-specific test lists include websites that are relevant and commonly accessed within specific countries, and such websites are often in local languages. Similarly to the global test list, country-specific test lists include websites that fall under the same set of 31 categories, as explained previously. All test lists are hosted by the Citizen Lab on GitHub, supporting OONI and other network measurement projects in the creation and maintenance of lists of URLs to test for censorship. As part of this study, OONI and Sinar Project reviewed the Citizen Lab’s test list for Myanmar by adding more URLs to be tested for censorship. Overall, 822 URLs that are relevant to Myanmar were tested as part of this study. In addition, the URLs included in the Citizen Lab’s global list (including 1,105 different URLs) were also tested. It is important to acknowledge that the findings of this study are only limited to the websites that were tested, and do not necessarily provide a complete view of other censorship events that may have occurred during the testing period. OONI network measurements The Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) is a free software project that aims to increase transparency of internet censorship around the world. Since 2012, OONI has developed multiple free and open source software tests designed to examine the following: Blocking of websites. Blocking of censorship circumvention tools (such as Tor). Blocking of instant messaging apps. Detection of systems responsible for censorship, surveillance, and traffic manipulation. As part of this study, the following OONI software tests were run from six different local vantage points in Myanmar: Web connectivity HTTP invalid request line HTTP header field manipulation Vanilla Tor https://ooni.org/post/myanmar-report/ 10/19