People in Bangladesh have turned en masse to the VPN apps to bypass ongoing internet restrictions in the aftermath of widespread anti-government protests.
The first spike in VPN usage was recorded on July 23, 2024, when authorities began to ease fixed-line internet restrictions after five days of complete internet shutdown.
Mobile connectivity was restored on Sunday, July 28. Yet, access to the likes of Facebook, TikTok, WhatsApp, and YouTube is still restricted at the time of writing. This explains why data shows VPN downloads and signups continue to be high across the region.
Proton recorded VPN usage spikes in 11 countries since January alone. Similarly to the Bangladesh case, most of them were linked with social unrest including Kenya at the end of June, New Caledonia in May, and Senegal in February.
With social media platforms being blocked in Bangladesh at the time of writing, VPNs remain a crucial tool if you’re inside the country.
Hopefully people adopting VPNs en masse will start pressuring services to better support VPN traffic.
Maybe even lemmy.world will one day officially allow posts/comments from those behind a VPN.
I didn’t realize instances were doing this! That seems to go against the spirit of federated social media, FOSS, etc.
Yeah, I mean it sounds like too many users hiding behind a VPN were posting the kind of stuff that no admin wants to deal with and they got sick of it. So in that sense, I get why they did it. It’s just unfortunate that VPNs get bad rep because of abuse like that.
https://lemmy.world/post/11967676
Yeah, I’m a web developer and I get it from that perspective but as a VPN user I loathe websites that have a bunch of hoops to jump through. I just want better privacy laws (as well as to block ads/tracking, but that can be done without necessarily using a VPN).