This website is blocked for some Internet connections

Back in 2020 and 2021, major social media sites and smartphone App Stores engaged in censorship of vaccine related information. One major social media website deleted a meeting group for unvaccinated people when it grew to 10,000 members. One unvaccinated dating app was removed from Apple’s App Store.

The whole point of having a website and not using a mainstream social media site, is that you won’t get deleted when you grow too large or when people discover you are using the carrot emoji 🥕 in place of the word vaccine.

In the last few days, two members of this website told me unjabbed.net was blocked when they tried to access it.

They were obviously not using home Internet connections, but rather those from public WiFi at train stations or perhaps in a university or corporate environment which use filtering. I think what is going on is that when a web browser tries to look up the IP address of a website, an intentionally different address is passed back which brings up a blocked message.

I found one relevant post about this referenced below.

https://www.sitejabber.com/reviews/neustar.com

Over the past few days I’ve been trying to get this fixed, but it does seem like censorship by another name. It is unknown whether this is just an accident or done on purpose.

All organisations and companies providing services which categorise websites and mark them as unsafe should have websites publicly showing how each website is categorised and the ability to submit false positives and suggest new classifications.

On reflection, it could be a naive computer program is trawling the Internet for websites and categorises them. It has a very simple logic and just looks for certain keywords, whether or not they reflect the website as whole. Voila! Our website gets put in a bad category and the data file containing this is transmitted to lots of other computer programs around the world. In filtered networks our website is blocked. As computer programs transmit files containing lists of bad websites to each other, nobody actually knows where the source of this information originates from. A problem now exists and finding how to fix it is difficult, time-consuming and may be impossible. I’ve found two organisations which categorise websites and submitted reports to them moving us from a bad category to a better one.  If there are more in existence the problem will not get solved anytime soon.