Despite there being 19 so-called “enemies of the world”, there are only 6 countries who actually block social media.

Dadaviz (Dadaviz is a data visualization company based in Tel Aviv) have put together a helpful graphic, showing who these are and which channels they block.

In 2014, Reporters Without Borders labelled 19 countries around the world as “enemies of the internet” for a number of reasons. For example, Britain is on the list due to its distributed denial of service attack against Anonymous, alongside North Korea, which has its own weird internet where users can’t access the global web.

Of the six countries, the least surprising has to be North Korea.  It is the only country listed that is entirely closed off from social media. Although the other countries have bans in place, users can use VPNs to reroute their internet traffic and access websites that have been blocked.

Unlike the other five countries, Turkey is both a NATO member and a hopeful applicant to the European Union. Turkey is also a democracy, so blocking its social media is even more unexpected and worrying.

Still, Turkey’s ban on social media isn’t always enforced, unlike the other countries. Turkey will just pick and choose when it enforces it’s social media ban, making it nice and sporadic! It’s most recent blackout was implemented after a Marxist terrorist organisation which held hostage a state prosecutor started to distribute images of the crisis online.

No so long ago, Ankara banned YouTube for 30 months after someone posted video that insulted the founder of Turkey.

Perhaps soon enough social media will be available to all. Sometimes we don’t realise how lucky we are that we can post pictures of our meals to Instagram!

Take Away

With a global audience there is only one way to communicate and that is digitally. Social media has it’s role to play keeping us entertained and informed. But if you are looking to showcase your expertise, may be to engage the members in your organisation or finding reasons for your customers to remain loyal to your brand, then going digital is no longer a choice it is a necessity.

At Page Lizard we work hard to make your job easy. With our mobile platform you only create your content once. Then distribute it everywhere. To mobile, to apps, to screens, branded to the way you want with the features you need to get the job done.

As a membership organisation you are never alone with Page Lizard we help you maximise your content. We came up with 15x great reasons why you would want to shift from printing your publications to going digital, read our blog and download our e-guide to help you make sense of the digital world.

The Page Lizard team provides all the services you will need from design, build, back-end integration, project management, submission, hosting – plus all the on going support you need to create mobile apps and online viewers.

Just let us know if you would like some advice on how you can accelerate the digital transformation of your business or organisation.

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