Hello,

Last Sunday, social media was reportedly inaccessible in Mali amid presidential elections.

Today, OONI published a short report providing network measurement data that corroborates local reports on the blocking of social media during the elections.

Our report is available here: https://ooni.torproject.org/post/mali-disruptions-amid-2018-election/

Daily OONI network measurements have been collected from Mali for more than a year, thanks to our local partners. This has allowed us to detect changes in censorship policies, particularly on the day of Mali's latest elections.

Our main findings can be summarized as follows:

1. Orange Mali (AS30985)**appears to have blocked access to WhatsApp (app and web.whatsapp.com), Twitter, guardianproject.info and anonymizer.ru in the evening of 29th July 2018 (election day). These platforms had previously been accessible (pretty much) every day over the last year in this network (strongly suggesting that they were temporarily blocked).

2. Measurements collected from SOTELMA (AS21271)**don't show signs of internet censorship on 29th July 2018. Therefore, social media sites (and circumvention tool sites) weren't blocked by all ISPs on Mali's election day.

If you're interested in expanding upon this study (particularly as political events in Mali unfold), you can do so through the use of OONI Probe (https://ooni.torproject.org/install/) and OONI data (https://ooni.torproject.org/data/).

Thanks for reading!

All the best,

Maria.****