Censorship from 0 to 60 - Censorship.wtf

The speaker is Costanza from the Swarm Foundation. She'll be talking about the various level of internet censorship and how web3 can help us to do so, using the Wikipedia case study

This talk is not legal advice and does not represent any organization that she is or was affiliated with.

About Internet censorship (2:29:30)

What do Venezuela, the UK, Russia, China and France and many other countries have in common ? They have restricted or blocked access to Wikipedia

Countries claim restricting Wikipedia is to "protect people" from fake news or classified information, but it often serves to censor information that goes against a government's narrative.

Wikipedia Censorship (2:31:40)

Censorship happens on a human level by arresting people, and on a technical level by preventing access to content. An example given is the arrest of a Wikipedia editor in France who was ordered to remove an article, even though he had no connection to it whatsoever.

Another method of censorship mentioned is threatening infrastructure providers, like what happened with the Tornado Cash GitHub repository being taken down after pressure.

We had another examples with Russia fining the Wikimedia Foundation millions of rubles for not deleting certain Wikipedia articles about topics like the Russian army and songs.

Blocking content access is called out as another major form of censorship against Wikipedia, done by both governments ordering internet service providers (ISPs) to restrict access, as well as ISPs taking independent action to limit availability.

Internet Service Providers are centralized (2:35:40)

Wikipedia infrastructure is hosted in 6 data centers in the US, Europe and Singapore by private companies. This is centralized.

Until 2015, Wikipedia used insecure HTTP protocol. This allowed partial censorship by governments and ISPs targeting problematic entries.

Now Wikipedia uses HTTPS, so entries can't be partially censored anymore. But options for censorship remain: some countries ban it entirely, some threaten people to delete entries.

Using a VPN to access Wikipedia is one solution when it's blocked, but VPNs are also centralized. They can be blocked by governments/ISPs and there's no guarantee people will keep using them if blocked.

Costanza told about VPNs working to access Wikipedia in China, but failing when she returned in 2019.

There is a need for a decentralized, uncensorable solution to access Wikipedia that doesn't rely on VPNs or other intermediaries that can be blocked.

Wikipedia on Swarm (2:38:30)

There is a decentralized, asynchronous mirror of Wikipedia hosted on Swarm network that allows access and searching of Wikipedia content in a censorship-resistant way.

It works by dividing files into small chunks, with each chunk stored across multiple nodes on the network.

Routing between nodes is done through "Kademlia routing" - nodes route messages to get them closer to the destination each hop without knowing the original sender or final recipient.

This provides anonymity for the original requester and endpoint, preventing nodes from knowing what content they are storing or serving.

The chunking and anonymous routing gives nodes "plausible deniability" so they cannot be held accountable or pressured to censor content, preventing middleman censorship risks.

What can we learn ? (2:41:00)

Three ways in which Wikipedia gets censored are blocking access to content, deplatforming and arresting people. And this is important because Wikipedia is just one example of permissionless publishing.

Publishing your website, your application on Swarm will give you total ownership of your content, making censorship more difficult.