The project is focused on providing an accessible means of understanding censorship occurring in Southeast Asia.
The state of online censorship for different categories for countries such as freedom of expression are only reported through manually compiled annual country reports, that are a collection of news reports, often with anecdotal and non-technical confirmation of censorship. The Open Observatory for Network Interference (OONI) project collects and makes available detailed measure data on Internet interference, but the current dashboard is not easily usable for the needs of civil society organizations, journalists, researchers and the general public. There is an immediate need for easy to read dashboards so more users such as journalists, civil society organizations and activists can easily make use of censorship measurements to support their work, and for the public to be aware of increasing Internet censorship. This project makes use of OONI’s recently published public API to develop a an online dashboard for several countries in South-East Asia, that will provide users with simple dashboard to quickly see the state of online censorship for their respective countries against categories such as freedom of expression and media freedom.
The project created an initial iteration of a website dashboard service that displays current and past Internet censorship of News Media, Political Criticism, Religion, Sex Education and Social Networks backed from the OONI API. The current version of the dashboard includes Malaysia, Myanmar, Indonesia, Vietnam and Cambodia. The dashboard will continue to be developed and serves as an open source template that can be used in other parts of the world.