Turkey Tells Twitter To Block Turkish Newspaper's Feed; Twitter Plans To Push Back

from the and-here-we-go-again dept

The Turkish government has been battling with Twitter for quite some time. It's gone after citizens for comments on Twitter, blamed Twitter for social unrest and even tried (temporarily) banning Twitter entirely in the country. There was even a lawsuit by the Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, filed with the Constitutional Court, over his own government's "failure" to implement rules for removing content on Twitter.

The latest, as turned up by Mathew Ingram, is that the Turkish government got a court order demanding that Twitter start blocking the feed of a Turkish newpspaer, Halkin Gazetesi (which means "The People's Newspaper.")

The order says the public prosecutor’s office “is currently conducting an investigation” into an incident involving trucks owned by the National Intelligence Agency, and that this crime involves a number of suspects and members of criminal organizations who cannot be identified.

A source close to Twitter said the court order was filed after the newspaper published information on its front page that the Turkish government claimed might compromise its investigation or be used in the course of military or political espionage, and then proceeded to tweet links to the story from its official account, which is @Birgun_Gazetesi.

Twitter has responded saying while it has blocked the information requested, it is going to file an objection with the court:

"Based on the attached court order received from Turkish authorities requesting removal of two entire Twitter accounts, Twitter, Inc. has been legally compelled to withhold access to one of the accounts and to withhold access to certain Tweets posted by the other Twitter account, as well as several other accounts' Tweets which were Retweeted by the identified accounts. Twitter will be filing an objection to this order as soon as possible."

As an aside, the information that Ingram mentions about how it involves an "incident involving trucks owned by the National Intelligence Agency" is actually redacted in the document -- but in truly amateurish fashion, it appears that whoever did the redactions did so in such a way that you could just copy and paste the text and see the text (this is like a failure of redacting 101)...

Filed Under: censorship, free speech, newspaper, turkey
Companies: halkin gazetesi, twitter