Turkish Twitter ban

The battle for free speech in the age of the internet is going on across the world. Freedom of speech, these days is seen as a human right, not a privilege granted by individual governments and it is individual governments that are discomfited by those freedoms that work the hardest to stifle a fundamental right. The Turkish government has blocked access to the micro-blogging website Twitter after it objected to particular content posted by Turkish users of the service that were an embarrassment to the government. On March 23, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan rejected accusations of intolerance — which has been widely condemned globally with the US comparing it with “burning books” — and said that he failed to understand “how sensible people still defend Facebook, YouTube and Twitter” as they are home to “all kinds of lies”. His words may be a harbinger of bans yet to come.



The Turkish prime minister’s claim in the same speech that Turkey “is not a banana republic” loses credence when his government acts like one. That the postings to Twitter were a considerable embarrassment to the Turkish prime minister and his family members is undoubted, but the threat they represent is only to him and his party, not to the security of the state as a whole. It should be noted that even Turkey’s President, Abdullah Gul, has spoken against the ban. Until a day ago, the ban was widely circumvented by Turkish Twitterers, but on March 22, the government blocked Twitter access at the IP level. The block had operated via a DNS block which re-routed users to another page, but users merely changed their DNS numbers and graffiti appeared all over the country advertising the numbers that still allowed access to Twitter. It can still be accessed using a proxy or by using the SMS service offered by phone companies. Turkish Twitterers were still managing 1.2 million tweets a day despite the efforts to block them. Echoes of our own government ban on YouTube resonate all around, particularly in the resistance to it by our netizens. Free speech always finds a way of being heard, whether governments like it or not.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 25^th, 2014.

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