Turkish Prime Minister Bans Twitter... Turkish People Turn Around And Ban The Ban
from the censorship dept
Over the last few weeks we've discussed a few times how Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan wanted to ban Twitter. If you don't follow the details of what's happening in Turkey, Zeynep Tufecki has a great backgrounder piece in the NY Times. Either way, the threats became reality, as Erdogan flat out announced his intent was to "eradicate Twitter" and also:I don't care what the international community says. Everyone will witness the power of the Turkish RepublicTurkish ISPs followed the orders to block Twitter, but so far, it's not the power of the Turkish Republic we're seeing, but the power of people and technology to route around attempts at censorship. Many people quickly turned to VPNs or realized that they could still Tweet via text message... or that they could use alternative DNS providers. In fact, it's reached such a level that there's graffiti on the walls in Turkey pointing to Google's DNS which lets users route around the Twitter block:
Twitter is blocked in Turkey. On the streets of Istanbul, the action against censorship is graffiti DNS addresses. pic.twitter.com/XcsfN7lJvS
— Utku Can (@utku) March 21, 2014
As we had noted earlier, while the Prime Minister has been pushing this, Turkey's (less powerful) President, Abdullah Gul has been fighting back against these censorship attempts, and even went so far as to get around the ban himself to tweet against the ban and his tweet quickly was retweeted thousands of times.
Twitter itself is apparently looking into legal action to restore the site fully, but so far it seems that basic technology and the will of the people is beating out the "legal" process. As Tufecki has now noted, Erdogan may have banned Twitter in Turkey, but "people in Turkey had banned the ban."
Filed Under: abdullah gal, censorship, dns, recep erdogan, recep tayyip erdogan, turkey, vpns
Companies: twitter
