Belarus Media Are Testing Censorship-Resistance Tools

The move comes as Belarus continues blocking its citizens from accessing local media websites, including the Belarusian branch of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, in the wake of a massive, three-day internet outage and weeks of protests over the Aug. 8 election.

To make their mobile apps more resilient, some Belarusian news organizations are using NewNode, a decentralized file-sharing service by the California-based startup Clostra, which basically runs on the same principle as torrents.

This story is much bigger than Belarus because Internet censorship is a global phenomenon.

Clostra counted only 10 NewNode users in Belarus.

Now Belarus is the largest user base for NewNode, Shalunov said.

Belorusian media learned about NewNode by "Word of mouth," the executive director of Clostra, Marina Feygelman, told CoinDesk, and because app stores were classifying the app as a VPN. During the internet shutdowns, VPN services surged in popularity in Belarus as people were looking for ways to stay online, and tools like VPNs and proxies helped trick the traffic filtering software employed by the government.

According to Shalunov, there are currently about two dozen media publications worldwide using NewNode for their mobile apps, although most of them prefer not to publicize this fact.

Radio Liberty's app is using both NewNode and Psyphon, a proxy that became extremely popular in Belarus during the post-election internet outage.

Radio Liberty decided this could be unsafe for its Belarus users, so it did not use that option for its app.

Tut.by, an independent Belarusian news publication whose website users were affected by the post-election internet outage, is now using NewNode tech for its new mobile app.