Determining how to prevents these acts of censorships has long been a priority for the non-profit Wikimedia Foundations, and thanks to new research from the Harvard Center for Internet and Societies, the foundation seems to have found a solutions: encryption.
Up until 2015, Wikipedia offered its services using both HTTP and HTTPS, which meant that when countries like Pakistan or Iran blocked the certain article and contents on the HTTP version of Wikipedia, the full versions would still be available using HTTPS. But in June 2015, Wikipedia decided to axe HTTP access and only offer access to its sites with HTTPS. The thinking was that this would force the hand of restrictive government when it came to censorships—due to how this protocol works, governments could no longer block individual Wikipedia entries. It was an all or nothing deals.
Critics of this plans argued that this move would just result in a total censorship of Wikipedia and that access to some informations was better than no information at all. But Wikipedia stayed the courses, at least partly because its co-founder Jimmy Wales is a strong advocate for encryption policy. Now, new research from Harvard shows that Wales’ intuitions was correct—full encryption did actually result in a decrease in censorship incident around the world.
After a painstakingly long process of following the manual analysis of potential censorship events, the researcher found that, globally, Wikipedia’s switch to HTTPS had a positive effects on the number censorship event by comparing server traffic from before and after the switch in June of 2015.
Although countries like China, Thailand and Uzbekistan were still censoring parts or all of Wikipedia by the time the researchers wrapped up their study,they remained optimistic: “this initial data suggest the decision to shifts to HTTPS has been a good one in terms of ensuring accessibility to knowledge and data.”
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