The Egyptian government appears to be continuing to block internet news outlets, a move it began last month with the censorship of some 21 independent news sites.
It is not clear why the escalating censorship is in place; the blocking is similar to the censorship initially put into place in Turkey, along with the arrests of journalists.
At this point, a ban has been in effect from May 24 to the current date, June 13, and is now also beginning to include sites that provide VPN services as well.
The Egyptian government has said that most of the sites that were blocked have expressed support for terrorism, or were associated with Qatar and the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood organization.
But Al-Borsa is a financial news outlet. Mada Masr has no Islamist ties, according to Reuters. HuffPost Arabi is not exactly a flaming terrorism outlet.
Media watchdog the Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression said many of the sites were changing their URLs in order to get around the ban: using https instead of http, for example. The organization has published a table of the banned news sites.
The AFTE has monitored 64 blocked websites as of June 13, and said that no official statement has been issued by any of the telecommunications companies, or government agencies to confirm or deny the ban.
Five internet companies with which AFTE communicated all claimed customers were having problems connecting to the blocked sites due to failures at the sites themselves and not to a ban.
