Turkey blocks Twitter after PM says he wants to ‘eradicate’ it
Twitter users in Turkey were blocked from the service Thursday night,
just hours after the country’s prime minister, Tayyip Erdogan, said he
wanted to “eradicate” it.
The site drew Erdogan’s ire after a number of users in recent weeks posted content such as voice recordings and documents claiming to highlight alleged corruption among some of his close associates. The prime minister has described it as a smear campaign orchestrated by his political opponents.
The site drew Erdogan’s ire after a number of users in recent weeks posted content such as voice recordings and documents claiming to highlight alleged corruption among some of his close associates. The prime minister has described it as a smear campaign orchestrated by his political opponents.
Twitter users inside the country were blocked from the site from around midnight local time, though workarounds were soon appearing online, one of which came from Twitter itself (below) explaining how users can post tweets using SMS ____ Click to follow this news on Twitter.
In a statement Thursday, the Turkish government said that court
orders demanding Twitter remove certain links had been ignored by the
San Francisco-based company.
“If Twitter officials insist on not implementing court orders and
rules of law….there will be no other option but to prevent access to
Twitter to help satisfy our citizens’ grievances,” the statement said.
In a speech to thousands of supporters Thursday ahead of local
elections at the end of the month, Prime Minister Erdogan was rather
more frank about the situation, calling Twitter “a malice to society,”
and saying he wanted to “eradicate” it.
“We will wipe out all of these,” Erdogan said. “The international
community can say this, can say that. I don’t care at all. Everyone will
see how powerful the Republic of Turkey is.”
Twitter said it is “looking into” the situation though is yet to make any official statement on the matter.
Earlier this month Turkey’s prime minister also threatened to ban
Facebook and YouTube after similar content alleging wrongdoing was
posted on the sites. The latter was banned in Turkey for three years from 2007 after videos appeared online that the government claimed insulted the Republic’s founding president.
The government has given no indication as to how long the Twitter
block will last, though as time goes on it’s likely an increasing number
of the 10 million users in the country will pick up on the workarounds,
allowing them to continue posting tweets.
Credit: Reuters
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