Medium

Medium Censorship: Why It's Blocked and How Users Access It

What Medium is

Medium is a publishing platform launched in 2012 by Evan Williams, co-founder of Blogger and Twitter. It's owned by A Medium Corporation and hosts millions of independent writers, journalists, and commentators. The platform operates on a freemium model where readers access most content without payment, and writers earn through a membership program and reader engagement metrics. Medium has become a significant venue for long-form journalism, technical writing, and political commentary, with a global user base estimated in the hundreds of millions monthly.

Why it's censored

Medium faces outright censorship or severe restrictions in at least eight countries, each with distinct regulatory motivations.

China blocks Medium under the Cyberspace Administration's content control framework. The platform's open publishing model—which allows uncurated political commentary—conflicts with state information control requirements. Medium's lack of content pre-moderation and refusal to establish a Chinese subsidiary make it incompatible with Chinese internet governance.

Iran restricts Medium citing national security and moral protection laws. The country's judiciary and Ministry of Communications and Information Technology have ordered ISP-level blocks, particularly targeting content critical of the government and human rights discussions. Iran's approach intensified after Medium became a documented channel for protest messaging during the 2017-2018 unrest.

Russia's Federal Service for Supervision of Communications (Roskomnadzor) began blocking Medium around 2015, initially targeting specific articles critical of the government. By 2020, restrictions widened to cover the platform broadly. The justification cited extremism concerns and violations of Russian media registration laws, though enforcement appears content-selective rather than platform-wide in some periods.

The UAE restricts Medium through its Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority, citing content deemed harmful to public morality and state security. Pakistan's Pakistan Telecommunication Authority has implemented intermittent blocks, particularly following articles on sectarian violence and military operations.

Technical blocking methods

Blocking mechanisms vary by country and infrastructure:

China uses multi-layered blocking: DNS poisoning at the Great Firewall level, IP-based filtering of Medium's servers, and SNI (Server Name Indication) filtering on HTTPS connections. This means even users who bypass DNS filtering face secondary blocks at the network layer.

Iran and Russia employ similar hybrid approaches—DNS manipulation combined with deep packet inspection (DPI) on encrypted traffic. Russia's blocking is technically sophisticated enough to identify Medium traffic even when users attempt basic obfuscation. Pakistan has relied primarily on DNS and IP filtering, making it less resistant to technical workarounds than China or Russia.

The UAE typically uses DNS filtering and maintains a national content filtering system that flags Medium domains.

User workarounds

Users in censored regions employ standard circumvention methods: VPN services that route traffic through unrestricted jurisdictions, DNS over HTTPS (DoH) or DNS over TLS (DoT) to bypass local DNS poisoning, and protocol obfuscation tools. Users in technically sophisticated blocking environments like China or Russia often layer multiple techniques—combining encrypted DNS with VPN protocols that mask traffic type. Some use proxy servers or Tor, though both carry network latency and reliability tradeoffs. HTTPS access, while encrypted, doesn't fully defeat DPI-based blocking in countries using advanced inspection equipment.

Alternatives

Substack, another open publishing platform, faces similar restrictions in China and partial blocking in Russia and Iran, making it a lateral rather than superior alternative. Ghost (self-hosted option) and Mirror (blockchain-based) offer decentralization advantages but have smaller audiences. Substack's compliance-focused approach makes it marginally more accessible in some regions, though not reliably.

Outlook

Restrictions are not easing. Blocks have stabilized or expanded since 2019 across all listed countries. China's restrictions show no sign of relaxing given broader tech sector control trends. Russia's blocking, while occasionally inconsistent, reflects permanent policy. Iran's approach has hardened following 2022-2023 protest movements. The outlook for Medium access in these regions is toward sustained, possibly deepening, restrictions.