On the hosts file as tool for black list.
hosts file technique to make accessing social media and traditional media and news sites of various types impossible. For example very marked advocacy journalism that does not conform to journalistic impartiality to fake news and misinformation and disinformation. Experiments in user attention and engagement as click bait.
So if a hyperlink is clicked on it does not display the page. The following message is displayed instead.
This site can’t be reached www.foo.com refused to connect.
Try:
Checking the connection
Checking the proxy and the firewall
ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED
Sometimes this message is displayed
This site can’t be reached
The web page at https://www.kni.co.uk/en-gb might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address.
ERR_FAILED
Or this one
This site can’t be reached zha.com’s DNS address could not be found. Diagnosing the problem.
DNS_PROBE_POSSIBLE
Not investigated what qualifies one response message or other. Or if there are other possible response messages. It is may be outlined in the HTTP protocol specification from IETF or Brave documentation implementation for Brave HTTP/HTTPS handing.
The performance of different browsers varies. The Brave browser though always eventually works. That is it accepts the URL content as blocked.
It is the psychological gaming of people by social media and traditional media companies that make it likely a user will select a given link to view. That is why it is important the user have a means to block content from sources they do not want to be gamed by. Game theory.
The pattern is whatever appears as the domain name after the protocol part of the URL. For example HTTP:// or HTTPS:// . For example different ways in which the domain name might be formatted.
https://www.foo.com/
https://zha.com/
https://m.nee.com/
https://www.kni.co.uk/
hosts file entry example
127.0.0.1 www.foo.com
127.0.0.1 zha.com
127.0.0.1 m.nee.com
127.0.0.1 www.kni.co.uk
The hosts file can be found in the following folder in MS windows
C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc
The hosts file must be edited with administrator privileges. Right click the Notepad app and select Run as administrator. In Notepad go to File>Open and navigate to the directory above System32\drivers\etc . To be able to see and select the file go to file type drop down next to the File Name field select All Files (.) . Edit file and save.
But this is not an optimal solution. It is a work around until such time as a better option is presented.
See discussion here
Also here