Internet Censorship

On 2 February 2018, the Egyptian authorities blocked the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) service in Egypt, after some websites (Mada Masr included) used it to overcome the blocking. AMP is a service provided by Google that aims at improving the performance of webpages on smartphones. This is done by enabling..Read More

In an attempt to prevent users from reaching the blocked websites, the Egyptian authorities blocked a big number of VPN providers. 250 proxy and VPN websites were blocked on 30 August 2017. The total number of blocked websites hence reached 398 (Massar statistics). It should be noted here, that the..Read More

On 16 June 2017, the independent news website Al-Manassa was blocked in Egypt. The website published the news: “Al-Manassa was blocked today morning inside Egypt, to be added to a list of more than 70 blocked websites in Egypt. Al-Manassa’s teamwork will continue their work challenging the blocking and will..Read More

A few days after the blocking of websites, Tor browser and 8 other subdomains of Tor project were blocked. Tor was blocked after it was noticed that its users are increasing in number to overcome the governmental blocking policies. Tor is an open-source application administrated by volunteers. Its aim is..Read More

On 24 May 2017, the independent news website Mada Masr was blocked in Egypt. Mada Masr’s staff published a statement on Facebook confirming news of the blocking. The statement said: “we confirmed with our technical partners that our website has been blocked. A reset packet has been injected into connections..Read More

On 24 May 2017, internet users were surprisingly faced by a blocking of 21 websites, among them Al-Jazeera, Rassd, the Qatari Al-Arab newspaper, Cairo Portal, and Mada Masr. Egypt’s Middle East News Agency reported “a high-level security source” on that day saying that 21 websites were blocked. The claim was..Read More

On 19 December 2016, the Egyptian authorities tried to block Signal application. Users subscribing to different networks suffered some difficulties in sending and receiving messages through the application that uses end-to-end encryption. The official Twitter account of Signal said, “we have confirmed that Egypt is censoring access to Signal”.

The Muslim Brotherhood Financial Assets’ Confiscation and Administration Committee decreed on 13 June 2016 the blocking of 16 website, and 16 media channels. The Committee said that the aim behind the decree was to “prevent their content reaching the Egyptian user”. Among the websites included in the ban are the..Read More

Al-Arabi al-Jadid news website was blocked on 30 December 2015 (it was blocked at the same time in both Saudi Arabi and the United Arab Emirates).