DW defies censorship with innovative solutions

According to Freedom House, global Internet freedom declined for the 14th consecutive year last year, emphasizing the need for censorship circumvention. DW offers its users a number of tools for detecting, identifying and circumventing state censorship, enabling them to access not only our content, but also free information provided by other platforms around the world.

Powerful allies in identifying censorship

Identifying censorship is the first vital step to working against it. That is why DW works closely together with OONI (Open Observatory for Network Interference) on the News Media Scan app for Android and iOS. Launched in 2023, the app calls up the websites of news and information providers. Data about the technical reachability of the individual sites is transmitted to OONI, where they are then collected and evaluated. The users are then provided with the analyzed data about which specific sites are available or blocked. This ensures full transparency about the reachability of news and information sites from the country in question.

After identification: Circumvention

To ensure its users continue having access to free information online, DW is promoting a number of tools for censorship circumvention, including third-party tools such as the Tor browser and the Psiphon bypassing tool. Tor stands for "the onion router" and ensures anonymity when users are surfing. While all sites are accessible, only the sites with so-called "onion services" are completely anonymous. Psiphon is a censorship resistance VPN tool that enables users to access content from DW and platforms that would otherwise be blocked in their home markets.

So you're censored. Now what?

As an international news organization dedicated to free information, DW is unfortunately no stranger to censorship. Currently, DW content is censored or blocked to varying degrees in China, Iran, Belarus, Russia and Turkey. While DW provides its users with the means to access the open Internet and, with that, its own content, reaching the audience and keeping them informed presents an additional challenge.

Here, DW employs a mix of social media, messenger services and other channels to make sure the target audience in a censored market knows how to reach DW. For instance, if the website is blocked, but Facebook is not, then DW could communicate a proxy link via a Facebook post to users, as well as links to and instructions on how to use tools like Tor or Psiphon.