Hello,

Two days ago JOSA (Jordan Open Source Association) and OONI co-published a research report which examines Facebook live-streaming interference during protests in Jordan (between December 2018 to January 2019).

The research report is available here: https://ooni.io/post/jordan-measuring-facebook-interference/

We also published a PDF version (thanks to JOSA!): https://ooni.io/documents/jordan-facebook-interference.pdf

During protests in Jordan, locals reported that they were unable to view live-streaming from Facebook. But they also reported that viewing live-streaming was otherwise possible when protests were not taking place.

Therefore, our first hypothesis was that perhaps people in Jordan couldn’t load videos on Facebook because they were using overloaded networks (rather than Facebook live streaming being interfered with).

To examine this hypothesis and investigate further, we:

* Enumerated Facebook cache servers to identify and map out those located in Jordan.

* Tested the Facebook cache servers in Jordan, using OONI Probe. OONI measurements presented anomalies, providing signals of potential interference.

* Ran a series of experiments using cURL.

As part of such testing, we were able to rule out the hypothesis that Facebook users in Jordan couldn’t live-stream due to overloaded networks.

Our findings suggest that Facebook Live Stream was temporarily interfered with in Jordan during protests between 20th December 2018 to 10th January 2019.

In this report we share our findings in detail, as these methodologies could potentially be useful in examining similar cases elsewhere in the world.

~ OONI team.