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Comment by aravindet | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have insight into why College Humor (referenced in the article) is blocked in India? This seems unusual and I wonder what (if any) reasons were provided.

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You have to understand that reasons aren’t provided for blocking, because the blocking orders may come from different authorities and may not be disclosed due to “national security” reasons. All that we can glean from a site being blocked is that someone influential (not necessarily from an arm of the government) got offended by the site and used some means to get it blocked.

One can construct a list of hundreds of URLs and get a blocking order, with a few innocent ones slipped in between. Nobody will investigate the claims, and nobody can contest the claims before it’s ordered, but the order for blocking will be issued.

Probably some toilet humour that the censors didn't like.

Another peculiar one being blocked (at least on Airtel) is Newgrounds. Not really sure what was going on when they decided to ban it.

Newgrounds is full of porn. It's probably blocked for the same reason pornhub is.

> In July 2015 the Supreme Court of India refused to allow the blocking of pornographic websites and said that watching pornography indoors in the privacy of one's own home was not a crime.[13] In August 2015 the Government of India issued an order to Indian ISPs to block at least 857 websites that it considered to be pornographic.[14] In 2015 the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) had asked internet service providers to take down 857 websites in a bid to control cyber crime, but after receiving criticism from the authorities it partially rescinded the ban. The ban from the government came after a lawyer filed a petition in the Supreme Court arguing that online pornography encourages sex crimes and rapes.[15]

> In February 2016 the Supreme Court asked the Indian Government to suggest ways of banning all forms of child pornography.[16]

> In October 2018 the government directed Internet service providers to block 827 websites that host pornographic content following an order by the Uttarakhand High Court. The court cited the rape of a 10th standard girl from Dehradun by four of her seniors. The four accused told police that they raped the girl after watching pornography on the Internet.[17]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_in_India#Legalit...

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