On 22nd June 2018, the Ethiopian government reported that it had unblocked 264 websites. This (great) news was also reported by ESAT, a major Ethiopian media website that was blocked over the last years.
Today, OONI and Access Now publish new research based on the testing of sites that were previously found to be blocked, in an attempt to examine whether they have in fact been unblocked in recent days.
We quite rarely hear of governments unblocking hundreds of websites in one go. This is also an important event given Ethiopia’s political climate and the conditions that led to pervasive levels of internet censorship. In addition to internet censorship, the Ethiopian government has prosecuted many for their online activities and repeatedly shutdown the internet. Now Almost all of the websites previously found to be blocked seem to have been unblocked over the last month. […] CONTINUE READING
