Censored Planet collected 21.8 billion measurements over 20 months from more than 95,000 vantage points in 221 countries, covering 66–173 more countries than OONI and ICLab, with a median of 8 ASes per country versus OONI's 4 and ICLab's 1. In March 2020, it achieved coverage of 9,014 ASes compared to OONI's 1,915. Censored Planet and OONI together covered all 21 countries rated 'Not Free' by Freedom House, while ICLab reached only 4.

Of 21.8 billion raw measurements, approximately 7% (1.5 billion) were initially flagged as blocked; iterative HTML clustering and DBSCAN image clustering then removed ~500 million false positives, leaving ~1 billion confirmed blocked measurements. The clustering process formed 457 new response clusters, of which 308 were confirmed blockpages and 149 were false positives, with Cloudflare bot-checks being a notable source of false positives in HTTPS measurements.

§5.1.3, §5.1.4 evaluation

Mann-Kendall trend analysis at 99% significance on 20 months of data found increasing censorship activity in more than 100 countries, driven primarily by DNS and HTTPS blocking methods, and identified 11 website categories facing rising censorship including human rights content, news media, and provocative attire. Countries such as Norway (ranked #1 in press freedom) showed aggressive DNS blocking across 25 ASes targeting more than 50 domains in at least 6 categories including hrw.org.

§7.2, §7.1.2 evaluation

Censored Planet achieves 93% /24 vantage-point continuity and 99.01% AS continuity between weekly scans, versus ICLab's 64% and OONI's 36% AS continuity. Applying bitmap-based anomaly detection on the resulting longitudinal time series detected 15 prominent censorship events over 20 months, two-thirds of which had not been previously reported, while OONI data showed no corresponding increase for most newly discovered events due to sparse volunteer measurements.

§5.3, §6.1, §7.1 evaluation

During the Sri Lanka social-media block following the April 21, 2019 bombings, Censored Planet measured HTTP(S) censorship jumping from 0.1% to 2% in one week and discovered 22 blocked domains versus the 7 reported by NetBlocks and AccessNow; 5 of those extra domains were only present in the Alexa top-sites list, not the Citizen Lab Global Test List. Blocking remained elevated through May 12, 2019, contradicting public reports that the ban was lifted by May 1st.

§7.1.1 evaluation

The largest single source of censored domains in the GNL is MESA lab's SNI monitoring dataset (E21-SNI-Top200w.txt) containing 57,362 censored domains, and E21-SNI-Top120W-20221020.txt with 36,467 domains—totaling over 93K domains from network tap data alone for a single country (E21 = Ethiopia per InterSecLab attribution). A separate Xinjiang dataset (XJ-CUCC-SNI-Top200w.txt) contains 13,604 domains. These datasets "do not seem to come from popular domain lists, and instead appear to be gathered from network taps," confirming that Geedge builds censorship target lists directly from passive traffic observation.

2026-sheffey-geedge §4.2, Table 3 dpisni-blockingmeasurement-platform

Of 6,915,266 domains extracted from the 572 GiB Geedge Networks Leak (GNL), 298,955 censored domains (93.7% of all GNL-censored domains) appear in neither Tranco top-1M nor CitizenLab test lists. Measurements across China (Guangzhou/Nanjing), Myanmar, Pakistan, and Algeria confirmed censorship via DNS injection and SNI-based TLS connection termination. The GNL covers 25–62% of Tranco-censored domains across countries, showing substantial but incomplete overlap. This vendor-side ground truth reveals a censorship surface roughly two orders of magnitude larger than curated academic test lists.

2026-sheffey-geedge §4.1, Table 2 dpisni-blockingdns-poisoningmeasurement-platform

CensorAlert aggregates censorship signals from heterogeneous open sources — including OONI, Cloudflare Radar, NetBlocks, GitHub Issues of circumvention tools (Hysteria, Xray), Net4People BBS, NTC Party forum, Mastodon, X, Telegram channels, and arXiv — normalizing each item into a common schema preserving timestamp, source, raw data, and provenance with a link to the original content.

2026-zohaib-extended §2 (Data Sources) measurement-platform

Systematic measurement platforms (OONI, Censored Planet, Cloudflare Radar, NetBlocks) have inherent blind spots due to geographic coverage and protocol-specific test constraints; critical censorship discoveries — including GFW fully-encrypted protocol blocking and regional Chinese censorship — were first surfaced by user reports on forums and GitHub issue pages of circumvention tools, not by automated measurement infrastructure.

2026-zohaib-extended §1 measurement-platformfully-encrypted-detect

CensorAlert generates text embeddings (OpenAI text-embedding-3-small) from each item's summary, title, and tags to cluster semantically similar reports within configurable time windows; near-duplicates such as reposts, copied headlines, and translations are collapsed into a single canonical post that preserves all original source URLs and metadata.

2026-zohaib-extended §2 (AI-based Scoring) measurement-platform

CensorAlert's LLM agent scores each ingested item 0–5 on five independent dimensions — credibility, novelty, impact, timeliness, and verifiability — then computes a normalized significance score (0–10) from these components; items are processed every two hours using OpenAI GPT-5 Thinking (hosted on Azure) constrained to return structured JSON output.

2026-zohaib-extended §2 (AI-based Scoring) measurement-platform