FINDING · EVALUATION
Venezuela and Cuba exhibit average unblocked rates of 68.83% and 69.70% respectively across 461,114 and 5,501 OONI tests, placing roughly 31% and 30% of probes as blocked — censorship rates comparable to documented heavy-censor states — despite being routinely excluded from standard censoring-country lists.
From 2025-lipphardt-1-800-censorship — 1-800-Censorship: Analyzing internet censorship data using the Internet Yellow Pages · §4.3, Table 3 · 2025 · Free and Open Communications on the Internet
Implications
- Circumvention tool infrastructure planning and user-targeting should treat Venezuela and Cuba as high-priority regions with censorship intensity on par with Iran or Russia, not as afterthoughts.
- Automated censorship monitoring pipelines should flag countries exceeding 25% blocking rates regardless of prior reputation, to catch under-resourced regions before circumvention tool capacity is deployed there.
Tags
Extracted by claude-sonnet-4-6 — review before relying.