The inexplicable Reddit outage in Colombia: the house loses

By: Alejandro Moreno

This text originally appeared in the Network of Experts on Democracy and Technology that this week Linterna Verde launched in alliance with La Silla Vacía.

At the beginning of the month, Reddit, an online forum and discussion platform with 73.1 million global users, was blocked in Colombia for six days. During the first hours and without any information, users speculated with all kinds of hypotheses: a sanction for political reasons, a restriction for hosting child sexual exploitation material or a measure against illegal gambling. In the end, the latter option turned out to be true, highlighting the disproportion and lack of transparency of the measure.

As recorded by the Karisma Foundation's Internet Blocking Observatory, people who tried to access Reddit during the blockade were met with a traditional screen of a downed page, without any additional explanation. In technical terms, the measure was taken in two ways: blocking the domain name system(DNS), which allows connecting Reddit.com with its IP address, or blocking the HTTPS security protocol, which allows sending data between the browser and the website in a secure way. According to Karisma, internet service provider Claro opted for the former and Tigo for the latter.

From many browsers and through the Reddit application, accessing the platform was simply unsuccessful. But in other ways the reason did appear: the user was redirected to a page of Coljuegos -the entity in charge of gambling in that country- with a warning: "This happens when you enter a page of illegal online gambling".

As it happens when big cities suffer a blackout, the return to normality took place in parts. First Tigo users, then Claro users. In total, the blockade lasted between four and six days. Today Reddit is fully active, but many questions about what happened remain in the dark.

The monopoly of gambling in the hands of the State gives Coljuegos superpowers to interrupt access to certain Internet sites. The law allows it to monitor channels, financial entities and web pages that may be serving these activities and eventually alert and order blockages.

So much for the regulation, which does not explain the procedure or the limitations of this type of intervention. As Karisma points out, in practice, the Ministry of ICT has a sort of black lists in which operators are informed of which pages must be blocked. On the one hand, there are those dealing with gambling, on the other hand, those with child sexual exploitation material.

As everything in this story, it is not clear how the Reddit domain ended up included in this index of banned pages, nor what were the reasons that initially led to it being considered a space for operating gambling games. According to the media Enter, Claro reported that it was an error on the part of the authorities that manage the list.

The episode exposes the lack of transparency surrounding these operations, as there is no public information about these lists or the authorities' motivations for including a site. Likewise, the lack of resources to request the correction of unfair or misguided measures that may affect the freedom of expression of hundreds of thousands of users is also present. There is no data on the number of people using Reddit at the national level, but, to give us an idea, the subreddit r/Colombia - a community dedicated to issues in the country - has more than half a million users.

The shutdown of Reddit also raises questions about the authorities' approach to the control of illegal online content. Suppose it were true that, as Coljuegos' initial measure suggests, in some corner of Reddit users were coordinating sports betting or any other unauthorized form of gambling. It is not understandable that the entity's response would be to block complete access, just as it would not be understandable if Facebook were blocked in Colombia because a page or group engaged in these activities.

Reddit, like other social networks, has a procedure to restrict content in a country if a public authority considers that it violates a local law. If Coljuegos has indeed detected accounts or communities dedicated to illegal gambling on Reddit or other platforms, the reasonable thing to do would be to process such requests and not block the whole for the part.

This is not to say that the content moderation procedures are sufficiently protective of users' rights, but in this particular case it could have prevented a total disruption. Either way, in the Reddit blackout we are left in the worst of all worlds: without the option of the private route and with the disproportionality of an official measure.

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