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"Just a few days after Turkey's scandal-rocked government banned Twitter by tweaking national DNS settings, the state has doubled down by ordering ISPs to block Twitter's IP addresses, in response to the widespread dissemination of alternative DNS servers, especially Google's 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 (these numbers were even graffitied on walls). "

"Facebook on September 22 dismantled a network of fake accounts that originated in China and the Philippines, including some that criticised the Communist Party of the Philippines and its armed wing Platforms such as Facebook have become political battlegrounds and have helped strengthen Duterte's support, having been instrumental in his 2016 election"

"While the ban was only meant to target Australian news publishers, dozens of pages run by key government agencies, community pages, union pages, charity organisations and politicians were also blocked for several hours."

"A state judge in the Brazilian state of Sergipe has ordered all mobile phone operators in the country to block Facebook-owned WhatsApp for 72 hours, nationwide. Those five telecom providers put the ban into effect today, and it affects about 100 million people. In Brazil, WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app."

"Telegram, a messaging app created by the reclusive Russian exile Pavel Durov, is suited to running protests for a number of reasons. It allows huge encrypted chat groups, making it easier to organise people, like a slicker version of WhatsApp. And its "channels" allow moderators to disseminate information quickly to large numbers of followers in a way that other messaging services do not; they combine the reach and immediacy of a Twitter feed, and the focus of an email newsletter. The combination of usability and privacy has made the app popular with protestors (it has been adopted by Extinction Rebellion) as well as people standing against authoritarian regimes (in Hong Kong and Iran, as well as Belarus); it is also used by terrorists and criminals. In the past five years, Telegram has grown at a remarkable speed, hitting 60 million users in 2015 and 400 million in April this year. "

"Taming trolls is fairly easy if you follow the four-step approach below. It really works-in public and private social-media spaces, I tame 90% of trolls after phase one and have blocked fewer than a dozen people over the past four years."

"Google and Mozilla are making changes to their respective web browsers to try and thwart the notoriously corrupt government of Kazakhstan's efforts to launch a surveillance operation against its own citizens."

"Like China's Great Firewall, the UK firewall is a patchwork of rules and filters that are opaque to users and regulators. Every ISP uses its own censorship supplier to spy on its customers and decide what they're allowed to see, and they change what is and is not allowed from moment to moment, with no transparency into how, when or why those decisions are being made. "

"Keyword-based filtering allows blocking of sites and texts containing candidates' names and slogans, say security experts"

"China's internet censors have cracked down on searches about the Panama Papers, a massive leak of documents that reportedly tie the relatives of current and retired Chinese politicians, including President Xi Jinping, to offshore companies used for tax evasion. The reports by an international coalition of media outlets working with the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, or ICIJ, are based on documents from the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca, one of the world's biggest creators of shell companies."

"Hu Xijin, a former editor of the ruling Communist Party's Global Times newspaper, warned that the use of the health code for purposes other than epidemic control "damages the authority" of the monitoring system and would chip away at the public's support for it. His post on Weibo, a Twitter-like social media platform, on Monday became a hashtag that was among the most-searched earlier this week, drawing 280 million views."