7 Nisan 2014

Twitter Ban in Turkey

As we all know, Twitter is one of the biggest social networking website in the world. However, it is blocked in Turkey a few days ago. The reason they tell is, Turkish Government asked Twitter to remove some content on Twitter and they refused. Can this be the real reason or is there something behind? What were those contents that they wanted from Twitter to remove?

In a way, Turkish Government tried to took the freedom of the press. It is impossible to shut down communication technologies like Twitter entirely. Community made movements to protest the decision. Amazingly, usage of Twitter is increased after the ban. People who totally far from technology and internet started to learn some ways to access Twitter.


One of them is domain name system, shortly DNS. It is basically using the IP address to connect to the website rather than using the name “twitter.com”. Unfortunately, Turkish Government does everything to ban it completely like blocking Google DNS or the IP address of Twitter. At this point, people started to use virtual private networks (VPN). It is already used in business for security.

I want to say that, one big security issue comes up with people’s clueless behavior. Everyone started to download several VPN applications to their smartphones. All of them are third-party software and not all of the third-party applications are reliable. These apps could steal people’s private data. So be careful and check the permissions while downloading an app.

Twitter didn’t make a comment about the ban but it informed its Turkish users how they could send tweets via SMS. Actually, Twitter is on the side of community.

Digital media has a big political and social impact. It is a tool for those who are against the government to spread ‘contents’. It also makes it easier to share their ideas about anything. In my opinion, Turkish Government made a bigger mistake by blocking Twitter while trying to hide those ‘contents’. It created a notion that the government doesn’t want the society talk anymore. I hope this will end soon.

Hiç yorum yok: