is OONI Explorer from Tor project trustworthy? Do only non-western countries block sites?

Question

I was very much surprised with those test results for Germany.

1,274,673 Measurements Collected
(...)
Top level domain    .de
Percent of population using the internet    86.8% (2014 est.)
Total population using the internet     70.3 million
Total population    80,854,408 (July 2015 est.)
Identified Vendors
We've identified no vendors for this country.
Blocked Websites
We've identified no blocked pages for this country.

They write about Germany

We've identified no blocked pages for this country

Germany censors 3.000 domains, this censorship list even got leaked. See Liste indizierter Webseiten geleakt: Bundesprüfstelle bestätigt Netz-Sperren-Kritik wie Overblocking for more info. Sorry the blog is in German, please use Yandex Translate.

Ein findiger, anonymer Nerd hat jetzt die Hashwerte der veröffentlichten Liste zurückgerechnet und als BPjM-Leak veröffentlicht [Update: Uns wurde wegen des Links mit Klage gedroht. Wir haben den Link rausgenommen und unsere Position in einem extra Beitrag erklärt.].

German Government even censored this leak. All leaked list are deleted.

Do I misunderstand what censorship is, or this Tor project? When you look at Non-Western countries, for example Russia, you see a huge list of blocked domains.

Answer 1

OONI makes a pre-defined test sets, the result you've got means that this list of censored domains was not checked in that particular run(s) that gave you these results. You can make your own tests and check the list you're interested in.

UPDATE: see the bottom of this page https://explorer.ooni.torproject.org/about/ =)

Special thanks to:

the German Federal Foreign Office for funding OONI Explorer

Answer 2

OONI Explorer, currently, considers a case of censorship of a website to be "confirmed" when

• The censorship is implemented by means of serving a blocking
• Such blockpage is known to us and is present in our blockpage fingerprint database

It may be the case that for German either we don't have a known blockpage or we haven't added it to our fingerprint database yet.

Another reason for blocking not appearing in a particular country is that the sites that are blocked are not getting testing as they are not part of the testing list corpus.

OONI is a community driven project, so here are a couple of things you can do to help us make testing for Germany more accurate and highlight more cases of censorship:

1. You can contribute to the test-lists by adding important sites to the Germany (or Global) lists. See: https://ooni.org/get-involved/contribute-test-lists/

2. If you know of blocked websites in Germany that are tested you can help us identify the blockpage fingerprint. The best way is to file an issue on github in the ooni/pipeline component. See: https://github.com/ooni/pipeline/issues/181 as an example for an existing issue on Germany.

Moreover to address your question of blocking in western countries, no that is definitely not the case, we have blockpage fingerprints for western countries too (such as Italy), though it is true that our primary focus is that of censorship that has more serious implication to freedom of speech (ex. the blocking of news and minority websites).