We tested 74 websites, including social media, news sites, messaging platforms, VPNs, human rights organizations, and more, from 53 countries using residential proxies. After filtering out anti-bot blocks (sites that globally reject automated traffic), we identified government censorship patterns worldwide.
We used GoProxies rotating residential proxies to simulate a real user visiting each website from each tested country. For every URL and country combination, we recorded the HTTP status code, response time, whether the connection was successful, and what type of block (if any) we encountered.
We then classified the blocks we encountered into several types: DNS blocks (domains don’t resolve), TCP resets (connections are forcibly closed), SSL interception (man-in-the-middle certificates), HTTP 403 (access denied), redirect blocks (sent to a government warning page), and timeouts.
Unprocessed, raw censorship scans produce significant false positives. Many websites, including ChatGPT, Claude, Medium, Quora, Zoom, and Gmail, return HTTP 403 errors to proxy traffic, regardless of the country you’re connecting from.
Without filtering, these appear as “blocked in 51 countries,” when they’re actually just rejecting automated requests globally. Our research team used this filtering method: first, we established a baseline of the following 15 “free internet” countries:
Any website that was blocked in 10 or more of these baseline countries was classified as anti-bot rather than proper censorship and excluded from our index. This removed 16 sites from the analysis, leaving 58 sites with verifiable censorship signals.
After processing the data, we scored each country on a scale from 0 (everything’s blocked) to 100 (everything’s accessible).
Most democratic countries cluster tightly at the top, scoring between 95 and 100. The meaningful differences emerge further down the ranking.
Let's take a look at what gets banned:
Pornhub was blocked in 16 countries, making adult content the most universally censored category.
Countries that blocked such websites include Bahrain, Belarus, Brazil, India, Myanmar, the Netherlands, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Thailand, Turkey, the UAE, and Uzbekistan. The Netherlands is a notable outlier among Western democracies.
VPN providers are the second most targeted category, particularly across Gulf states. This creates a layered form of censorship: governments restrict access to certain content, then restrict the tools people might use to bypass those restrictions.
The Kingdom of Bahrain stands out as the most aggressive VPN blocker: six different privacy services, more than any other country in our study.
Russia blocks Meduza (independent Russian news) and Bellingcat (investigative journalism).
Belarus blocks BBC News, DW News, Meduza, and three human rights organizations (Human Rights Watch, Freedom House, Reporters Without Borders).
Vietnam blocks BBC News and Amnesty International.
ILGA World (International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association) is blocked in Russia and the UAE.
This generally aligns with both countries’ legal frameworks regarding LGBTQ+ content and their attitude towards individuals in the community.
Here’s a breakdown of the notable insights from the most restrictive countries we tested:
Russia has the most diverse censorship profile in our study, targeting 8 unique site categories:
The blocking method is predominantly SSL interception, suggesting deep packet inspection infrastructure.
The UAE blocks 8 sites uniquely, with a clear focus on anti-censorship tools (ExpressVPN, Mullvad, Psiphon, Tor, Windscribe) and content the government considers sensitive (Bellingcat, ILGA World, Twitter/X).
With 83% of tested VPN services blocked, the UAE has the highest VPN censorship rate in our study.
Belarus shows a distinctive pattern: it specifically targets organizations that monitor human rights and press freedom.
BBC News, DW News, Human Rights Watch, Freedom House, Reporters Without Borders, and Meduza are all blocked.
This profile is consistent with suppressing information about domestic political repression.
The blocking method is exclusively SSL interception.
Bahrain blocks more VPN services than any other country we tested: ExpressVPN, Mullvad, ProtonVPN, Psiphon, and the Tor Project.
The country also blocks Al Jazeera, illustrating the ongoing political tensions with Qatar. All website blocks within the country use SSL interception.
Pakistan blocks encrypted communication tools, ranging from Signal, ExpressVPN, and ProtonVPN to even Microsoft Outlook, all via SSL interception.
This pattern suggests a sharp focus on controlling encrypted communications rather than blocking specific content categories.
Our scan detected only LinkedIn as blocked in China, which dramatically underrepresents the Great Firewall’s actual scope.
This is a known limitation: China’s censorship operates primarily through DNS poisoning and IP blacklisting, which residential proxies can partially bypass since they route through local ISPs that may use different DNS resolution.
Studies using other methodologies (OONI, Citizen Lab) document far more extensive Chinese censorship than what we found.
Our data should not be interpreted as China having open internet access.
The technical method used for website blocking reveals a lot of information about a country’s censorship infrastructure.
The UAE leads in SSL interception (13 found instances), indicating significant investment in deep packet inspection infrastructure. Belarus, Bahrain, and Russia also rely heavily on this method.
GoProxies Research Team is a group of analysts and writers focused on web data, online privacy, and proxy technology. They produce practical, research-backed content that helps readers understand digital trends, tools, and best practices.
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