New MOOC: Mitigating Online Censorship

Shoutout to Advocacy Assembly for launching a new series of courses to help understand and mitigate Internet shutdowns, a critical issue at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and for many other media organizations operating in autocratic environments.

These courses cover understanding shutdowns, network measurements, circumventing censorship, documenting human rights violations in such situations, and strategies for legal advocacy and campaigning.

I got to participate in one such course: Mitigating Online Censorship, an online course that reviews different forms of internet censorship, how and when they might occur, and safe methods for circumventing them.

I warned against the “illusion of openness” that occurs when governments block individual websites, and I emphasized the need to build strong relations with the audience and continuously educate the community on tools and strategies to circumvent censorship.

Here’s my interview:

Excerpts:

“As a user, you see that the rest of the internet may still be accessible, and you feel like you’re seeing the totality of information that is relevant to you or the totality of information that you need. And targeted censorship removes individual publishers from that debate and risks dramatically distorting it.”

“What we also do is do callouts inviting audience members to ask us questions. So if they have questions, they can write to us on whatever platform is still accessible. And we look through these questions and try to answer them—the most frequent questions they may have.”

You can take the course here for free.