Additional Context: This information was collected by Human Rights Watch, or HRW, in an interview with Maria Xynou, director of the Open Observatory of Network Interference, or OONI, in May 2025.The delay affected the thematic censorship pages, which would enable civil society to discover to censorship events affecting platforms of public interest, such as new media, which ended up launching in April 2025, and a new data processing pipeline, which launched in November 2025.

Devex Researcher Note: OONI states that a "significant portion" of their annual buget came from U.S. government grants, namely the State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, or DRL, and the U.S. Agency for Global Media's Open Technology Fund, or OTF, from which they received $289,307 in 2025. Support from the OTF was terminated in March 2025 and, although a court order obligated the U.S. government to pay out the funds that had already been promised to organizations, as of April 2026 future support remains possible but uncertain. DRL stopped funding the organization altogether.

Given U.S. government funding cuts, the organization states, the core focus in 2026 will be to maintain key products and data, expand fundraising efforts, taking on new projects only "if funding permits."

Source: Human Rights Watch