Skip to main content

Global Citizen #ShowupVote and the United States Election


Ahead of the 2016 United States elections, Global Citizen launched its “Show Up and Vote” campaign to encourage young Americans to vote. In addition to an online campaign, represented by the hashtag #ShowupVote, Global Citizen hosted a series of events and concerts with high-profile artists. 

Psiphon #ShowupVote Promotion During Elections

In the week ahead of the election, Psiphon promoted the #ShowupVote campaign to our US audience,
showing a selection of images and a brief paragraph explaining the importance of the project.

In the final two days ahead of the election, the promotion was changed to ensure maximum visibility of the #ShowupVote content.

As election day ended, Psiphon followed this up by taking users to Global Citizen’s live coverage, giving them a chance to follow the results as they came in.

Overall, Global Citizen’s content was seen 1.5 million times in the US.


Worldwide Interest in U.S. Elections

In highly censored regions, during national and international news events, it is common for the use of circumvention tools to increase as people attempt to acquire news from a variety of sources. The U.S. election was no exception.

There was an increase in use of Psiphon in many countries, including from Vietnam, Russia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, during the lead-up to and on the day of the election. The increase was most notable from China, where live-streaming coverage of the U.S. election was banned and TV networks were told to avoid “excessive” coverage of the event.


Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Why You Don't Need Google's Domain Fronting

Google’s removal of domain fronting emphasizes the need for solutions like Psiphon. Google has confirmed that they will block domain fronting across Google domains and App Engine. For many apps and publishers, this represents a step backwards in the fight for internet freedom. While Psiphon has never relied on this Google service, many app developers continued to depend on the practice as a convenient and straightforward means of circumventing state-level censorship, despite the long-running speculation that Google would close this loophole (eg. Will Scott’s blog post in 2017). While the announcement has been met with criticism from internet activists and service providers alike, Google has defended their decision, saying “ domain fronting has never been a supported feature ”. Domain fronting has been a popular means of censorship circumvention for several years, being embraced by popular apps like Signal, who publicly adopted the practice in 2016 . While using Google domain...
Read more

Amid major network disruptions, 1.76M Psiphon users in Belarus

The Psiphon network supported a peak 1.76 million daily active users during significant network interference that started August 9th, a figure that represents nearly 1 in every 3 internet users. A large-scale disruption to international internet access was observed in Belarus, beginning during the contested presidential election on August 9th. Widespread filtering was reported across all Belarusian networks, affecting popular messaging apps including Telegram, Viber, and WhatsApp; social media platforms Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Youtube; major app markets including Google Play and the App Store; email providers Gmail, Mail.ru, and Yandex; maps, banking, online media, and many other services. Rolling blackouts of the mobile networks also occurred nightly between 6PM and 6AM. The majority of VPNs were reportedly blocked as a result of generalized SSL/TLS filtering. Tor direct connections were disrupted by the increased network change, while Tor bridge users reached a peak 8,0...
Read more

Cybernews Interview, Psiphon: “the world is becoming more and more privacy-conscious”

Most of us are aware of the necessity of having strong VPN protection in place. But what are the inherent issues with standard VPN applications, and how can they be solved? While choosing the best VPN often comes down to its features, the problem with many of the modern VPN applications concerns easily recognizable traffic in certain Internet environments despite the implemented end-to-end encryption. But what can be done about it? To discuss this matter, we’ve reached out to Alexis Gantous, a member of the Business Development and Operations team at Psiphon Inc, a company that works on providing uncensored Internet access for Windows and mobile devices. How did the idea of creating Psiphon originate? Psiphon was founded out of a research project at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, founder and CEO Michael Hull saw the opportunity to take the original peer-to-peer system and further develop it to fill the needs of millions around the world who face restrictions to their access t...
Read more