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Websites banned in the world

According to the recent World Information Access report, since 2003, “64 citizens unaffiliated with news organizations have been arrested for their blogging activities”. But it’s not just individual bloggers who are under threat. There have been numerous attempts by governments to censor social media sites. Using IBM’s ManyEyes tool, we’ve created a map of the most censored websites around the world.


You can find the World Information Access report here [PDF] [via]
Unfortunately, this list is probably only the tip of the iceberg. Most of the reports of censorship are based on stories by major news outlets. If we have missed any sites or countries then please leave a link in the comments section to an article with more details so we can update the map.
Also, please feel free to embed the map on your own site. You don’t need to attribute a link to this site, but it would be nice if you could link to one of the following sites:

globalvoicesonline.org
committeetoprotectbloggers.org

We only looked at platforms and not individual sites. While some of the sites are no longer banned, we thought it was better to include any that have been banned previously.
Click on the map below to interact with it. (You can also use the ManyEyes tool to update the data yourself).
Here is a table listing which sites have been banned by each country. The most censored site was YouTube where we found reports of nine countries that had censored the site over the last few years.

Country Banned Websites
Brazil YouTube, Wordpress
China YouTube, Wikipedia
Ethiopia Blogger
India Blogger
Indonesia YouTube, MySpace
Iran Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia, Orkut
Morocco YouTube
Pakistan YouTube, Blogger, Wikipedia
Saudi Arabia Flickr, Orkut
Syria Facebook
Thailand YouTube
Turkey YouTube, Wordpress
United Arab Emirates Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Orkut
List of sources for each site below:

Facebook

Iran
Syria
United Arab Emirates

Youtube

Turkey
Thailand
Pakistan
China
Indonesia
Brazil
Morocco
Iran

MySpace

Indonesia

Flickr

United Arab Emirates
Iran
Saudi Arabia

Twitter

United Arab Emirates

Blogger

Ethiopia
India
Pakistan

Wordpress

Brazil
Turkey

Wikipedia

China
Iran
Pakistan

Orkut

Iran
United Arab Emirates
Saudi Arabia
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