Censorship Chokepoints: New Battlegrounds for Regional Surveillance, Censorship and Influence on the Internet
Yong Zhang, Nishanth Sastry
TL;DR
The paper introduces a chokepoint-based taxonomy to understand modern Internet censorship, distinguishing hard (explicit, often permanent) from soft (implicit, harder to detect) bottlenecks that span client devices, servers, social platforms, search engines, and AI models. It surveys concrete instances across four hard chokepoint modalities and six soft chokepoint modalities, highlighting evolving mechanisms such as attention manipulation, shadow banning, and AI-model alignment, as well as associated countermeasures. The authors argue for greater scrutiny of ML-driven filtering, decentralised architectures, and open-source tools to counter censorship, while advocating global monitoring to quantify and contextualise censorship dynamics. The work aims to bridge censorship and resistance research by mapping diverse practices to chokepoints and outlining practical strategies for measurement and circumvention. The findings underscore the growing prevalence of covert and cross-location censorship and the importance of developing adaptable, interoperable resistance techniques.
Abstract
Undoubtedly, the Internet has become one of the most important conduits to information for the general public. Nonetheless, Internet access can be and has been limited systematically or blocked completely during political events in numerous countries and regions by various censorship mechanisms. Depending on where the core filtering component is situated, censorship techniques have been classified as client-based, server-based, or network-based. However, as the Internet evolves rapidly, new and sophisticated censorship techniques have emerged, which involve techniques that cut across locations and involve new forms of hurdles to information access. We argue that modern censorship can be better understood through a new lens that we term chokepoints, which identifies bottlenecks in the content production or delivery cycle where efficient new forms of large-scale client-side surveillance and filtering mechanisms have emerged.