How to Use OONI Probe to Test Internet Censorship on Your Network

Updated

OONI Probe is a free app from the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) that tests whether websites and apps are blocked on your network, and also measures network speed and performance. Install it on your device, run the built-in tests, and your measurements are uploaded to OONI's open dataset, where you can review them alongside results from more than 200 countries collected since 2012. It's the right tool if you want evidence about what your network blocks rather than a general impression — but it tests specific categories of sites and services, not everything you might care about.

What OONI Probe actually measures

OONI describes two broad jobs for the app:

  • Test the blocking of websites and apps. This is the censorship-detection side: you run tests against lists of sites and services, and the app records whether they were reachable and how the connection behaved.
  • Measure the speed and performance of your network. This is the network-quality side, useful for separating "this site is blocked" from "my connection is just slow or unstable."

The distinction matters when you interpret results. A failed connection is not automatically censorship — it can also come from a down server, a misconfigured network, or transient problems. OONI's methodology pages exist precisely because reading these measurements correctly takes some care.

Installing and running a test

The general flow is the same on any supported device:

  1. Install OONI Probe from your platform's app store. OONI publishes the app for common mobile and desktop platforms; use the official listing rather than a third-party mirror.
  2. Open the app and run a test. OONI Probe ships with a set of test categories you can launch individually or as a group. Pick the category that matches your question — for example, website reachability if you want to know whether specific sites load.
  3. Let the test finish and upload. Measurements are sent to OONI's servers, which is what makes them part of the public dataset. If you don't want your results published, don't run the tests — the upload is the point of the tool, not an optional extra.
  4. Note what you tested and when. Censorship is often intermittent and event-driven, so the date and the specific test matter as much as the result.

A practical habit: run the same test more than once, ideally on different days. A single run tells you what happened once; a series tells you whether a block is consistent.

Reading your results and the global picture

Your own measurements are most useful when compared against something. OONI Explorer is the companion tool — it's described as the world's largest open dataset on internet censorship, with millions of measurements from more than 200 countries since 2012, and it lets you track censorship worldwide in near real time.

Use it in two directions:

  • Check your own network. Find measurements from your country and network to see whether what you observed matches what others observed.
  • Check the global picture. OONI's research blog shows what this data looks like when analyzed — for example, posts on IP-based blocking during LALIGA football streaming in Spain, on blocks of reproductive health websites in Italy, and on throttling of social media in Türkiye during protests. These are useful models for what a well-supported censorship finding looks like, as opposed to a single failed page load.

If you're new to the terminology, OONI publishes a glossary and a FAQ alongside the data explorer; both are worth skimming before you draw conclusions from a result you don't recognize.

Common pitfalls

  • Treating one failure as proof of blocking. Cross-check with repeated runs and with OONI Explorer data from your network.
  • Forgetting that tests are category-based. OONI Probe checks the sites and services in its test lists. A site outside those lists won't be covered unless it's added.
  • Ignoring the upload. Results only become part of the public record once submitted; local-only testing limits what you and others can compare against.
  • Assuming a slow result means censorship. That's why the performance tests exist — run them to rule out ordinary network problems.

Getting involved beyond testing

OONI frames itself as a global community effort, and the site has a "Get Involved" section for people who want to contribute beyond running tests — for instance by helping expand test lists or contributing to research. If your interest is ongoing monitoring of a specific network or region rather than a one-off check, that's the path to look at.