Turkey bans Twitter
Anna Sonny, 21 March 2014
Late on Thursday night, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened to ban Twitter. 12 hours later, the site was blocked.
Erdogan’s trouble with Twitter has been on-going; ever since the social media platform played a huge role in the anti-government protests of last year, the government has been finding new ways of curbing freedom of expression by passing new internet laws, allowing certain websites to be blocked without a court ruling. But more recently Twitter has been causing problems a bit closer to home for the Prime Minister; he is currently embroiled in an alleged corruption scandal and leaked recordings have been frequently appearing on the site.
The Prime Minister’s complaint is that Twitter failed to follow Turkish court orders to remove certain links on their site. His office released a statement saying that they had ‘no other option but to prevent access to Twitter to help satisfy our citizens’ grievances.’ This statement would perhaps be closer to the truth if the word ‘citizens’ was removed; it is clear that Erdogan is protecting his elite – not Turkish citizens.
Twitter has proven to be powerful tool for the public in recent years and a threat to autocracy; its quick-fire spread of information mobilises the masses and has fuelled protests such as those in Egypt in 2011, where the micro-blogging site was made inaccessible by the government for a short period.
After the site was blocked in Turkey, Twitter sent out a message in Turkish and English to provide an alternate means of tweeting via text. But the Prime Minister has already announced that he may not stop at Twitter; he has also threatened to ban Youtube and Facebook.
At a campaign rally in Bursa yesterday, Erdogan declared: ‘I don’t care what the international community says. Everyone will witness the power of the Turkish Republic.’ In the meantime the hashtag #Twitterisblockedinturkey has been tweeted and retweeted tens of thousands of times across the international community.
In the midst of the 2013 protests in Turkey, Erdogan declared, with a complete disregard for the hypocrisy encrypted in his rhetoric, that social media was the ‘worst menace to society’. But the true menace to any society is the clamping down on freedom of expression to keep corruption under wraps; this is the reserve of autocratic rulers attempting to tighten their control.