Effective Anti-Censorship is a Partnership Between Technology and People

Internet freedom doesn’t happen through technology alone. It doesn’t happen through goodwill alone. What actually works is the combination of both: continuous technical innovation, and the engagement and participation of the ordinary people for whom it matters most — the people in the censored country, and those in the diaspora. Psiphon learned that lesson during one of the most severe internet shutdowns the world has ever witnessed: the one we just went through in Iran, in early 2026.

The Power of the Diaspora

On January 30, 2026, at the peak of Iran’s worst-ever internet restrictions, Psiphon recorded more than 9.5 million unique daily users inside the country — more than one in ten Iranians, on a single platform, in a single day. As the shutdown grew in scope and impact, half of the traffic supported by Psiphon was flowing through Conduit stations hosted by members of the Iranian diaspora. They responded en masse, and it’s because of that enthusiastic and committed participation that Psiphon was able to keep supporting Iranians during the crisis.

In the two weeks following Iran’s most severe disruptions, approximately 200,000 diaspora members signed up to run Conduit stations — not for their own access, but to help people inside reconnect. Using spare phones and home Wi-Fi connections, they built a distributed network that carried nearly half of all Psiphon bandwidth reaching Iran. Iranians who had been offline for two weeks started to reach their family and loved ones again through social media and messaging services.

In other words, the diaspora wasn’t just supporting the infrastructure — the diaspora was the infrastructure. The Russian diaspora can build the same resilient network.

From Ordinary to Extraordinary

Censorship works when there’s a centralized target to hit. But because Conduit is a participatory network, it’s a moving target. Every station — whether it’s running on an ordinary device, on a residential connection, or on a commercial network — becomes part of a distributed, growing network with no single point of failure. A government trying to suppress tens of thousands of individually operated stations, spread across dozens of countries, faces a far more challenging problem than blocking a server or a network. And the more people participate, the tougher that problem becomes to solve. That’s what makes Conduit so effective: it harnesses the power of ordinary people to make an extraordinary difference.

Show Your Extraordinary Love Through Conduit

You can download Conduit for free and host your own Conduit Station.

Or you can subscribe to Hosted Conduit. Through Hosted Conduit’s personal pairing feature, you can directly support up to 99 friends and family members inside Russia, giving the people you care about a trusted, reliable connection to the open internet. At the same time, your Hosted Conduit station contributes to the global anti-censorship capacity.

The cost is just cents a day. And every person who joins makes the network stronger for everyone who depends on it.

You may not be able to change Russian policy from the outside. But you can be part of a movement that makes censorship harder to enforce, one station at a time. Conduit worked in Iran, and you can help make it work in Russia.

Join the movement at conduit.psiphon.ca.

When Iranian authorities initiated a near-total internet blackout during the 2025 conflict with Israel, the move disrupted far more than public discourse—it paralyzed digital infrastructure across the country.

Cloud-dependent platforms largely went dark, and from financial transactions to logistics, both businesses and millions of people lost the ability to participate in their digital infrastructure.

Despite the fact that Psiphon maintained connectivity for over 1.5 million Iranians at the height of the shutdown, it underscored a critical and growing risk: in contested regions, internet access is not a given—it is a political and social strategy that is vulnerable to abrupt, unpredictable, and unilateral control.

This isn’t an isolated case. Across the Middle East, Central Asia, and parts of Southeast Asia, governments are increasingly using network control. From throttling during protests to geoblocking entire platforms, digital interference has become normalized. Businesses reliant on stable connectivity—whether for defense, cross-border logistics, IoT, communications, enterprise software, or cloud-based customer platforms—must now factor censorship and disruption into their risk models.

Psiphon Forge addresses these realities with an embeddable, battle-tested API that ensures application-level resilience through multi-protocol tunneling and real-time network adaptation. Built on Psiphon’s global anti-censorship infrastructure, Forge helps businesses maintain critical operations and data flows, even in regions where connectivity is deliberately constrained.

The lesson of the Iranian shutdown is clear when it comes to networks. Making sure your network infrastructure can withstand unpredictability and maintain connectivity must be part of “business as usual.”