How India Censors The Web -- Data

A list of URLs potentially blocked by Indian Internet Service Providers.

Please cite the following paper if you use this data it in your work.

Kushagra Singh*, Gurshabad Grover*, and Varun Bansal.
2020. How India Censors the Web.
In 12th ACM Conference on Web Science (WebSci ’20), July 6–10, 2020, Southampton, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.1145/3394231.3397891

Data Curation and Filtering

We compile the largest-known list of potentially blocked websites from various sources government orders, court orders, user reports, RTI by CIS, list of potentially blocked websites by OONI and miscellaneous.

Structure for repository is as follows:

• potentially_blocked_urls.txt -> All the urls curated from the various sources
• potentially_blocked_unique_hostnames.txt -> All the unique hostnames derived from the above list

Sources:

• Court Orders

  • RTI: MeitY provides details of Blocked Websites/URLs -- SFLC.in
  • COMM_582_2017_.pdf -- SLFC.in
  • Analysing Latest List of Blocked Sites (Communalism & Rioting Edition) -- CIS India
  • Court Order -- Delhi High Court

• Govt Orders

  • DoT_Letter_3107201_2496720a.PDF -- thehindubusinessline.com
  • List by Twitter User @pranesh (Pranesh Prakash)

• Misc

  • User reports collected by Internet Freedom Foundation (as of 15th December, 2019)
  • DIT's Response to RTI on Website Blocking -- CIS India
  • Text of DIT's Response to Second RTI on Website Blocking -- CIS India