Inside the Firewall: Tracking the News That China Blocks

By Sisi Wei, ProPublica, Dec. 17, 2014

Every day since Nov. 17, 2014, ProPublica has been testing whether the homepages of international news organizations are accessible to browsers inside China. Of the 18 in our test, 9 are currently blocked. Below are the results. To test, we use GreatFire.org, a censorship monitoring service in China that launched in 2011. Methodology

Hover over the graphic to see dates. Click on a date to see more details.

Our automated tests run shortly after midnight U.S. Eastern Time, which is 1 p.m. in Beijing. They run on up to eight servers in separate locations in China, and can return one of four results:

ProPublica will continue to monitor news sites daily, and may add additional news sites in the future. Know a site we should add? E-mail Sisi Wei at sisi.wei@propublica.org.

Additional design and development by Lena Groeger, Mike Tigas and Yue Qiu.

ProPublica, with permission, used data from GreatFire.org, a free service that anybody can use to test if a website is accessible within China. Its pseudonymous founders are activists who created the site to highlight online censorship in China.

GreatFire.org runs tests only upon request. Historical test results are therefore not necessarily available every day. On Nov. 17, 2014, ProPublica began initiating daily tests for 15 international news sites, and on Dec. 5, we added three more sites for testing. We plan to continue testing and updating this database every day for the foreseeable future.

We chose the 18 sites in our test because of their status as internationally important news sites or because theyve recently run stories that led them to be blocked inside China. We are able to add more sites to the database. If you think you know a site we should be testing, let us know by emailing sisi.wei@propublica.org.

The most accurate test of censorship is conducted inside the censoring country, but doing so comes with a variety of risks. Continual attempts to visit blocked sites are detectable by the local authorities, and can therefore be dangerous political activity. ProPublica has spent the last year attempting to perfect a way to test censorship around the world using computers inside each censoring country. We have not yet found a testing method that would ensure participants safety, though we continue to look for a solution. In the meantime, were using the GreatFire service already available inside China.

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Inside the Firewall: Tracking the News That China Blocks