I am in Thailand, and neither bbc.com nor medium.com are blocked right now. Do you mean that they can selectively be blocked? “Problematic” articles, critical of government or key public figures?
From my understanding of TLS and how governments are able to block sites (IP, DNS, SNI) it shouldn't under normal circumstances be possible for them to block specific articles. Maybe if they somehow could control the Certificate Authority, they would be able to bypass TLS, but I don't think that qualifies as a 'normal circumstance.'