Mehmet Baransu, who is known to have published leaked military documents at Taraf daily, and Rasih Yılmaz, a Bugün columnist, movie critic and an author, led a campaign yesterday against Ekşi Sözlük. Ekşi Sözlük with more than 10,000 thousand contributors is the biggest online forum and one of the few independent sites against increasing conservative hegemony in Turkish media.
The campaign started because of some entries that allegedly insulted Islamic values. One entry contributor has been sentenced to 1,5 years a few days ago but this does not appease Mr. Baransu and Mr. Yılmaz and they want the site to be closed. This call to shut down the site has been a Turkey trending topic yesterday and today counter campaign- don’t touch Ekşi Sözlük- is the new trending topic. Free spirited web users were quick enough to strike back.
Baransu and others demonstrate that Islamist/conservatives are not to be trusted in democratic struggles. They are with the rights activists as long as their own agenda suits and they can easily switch sides when their purpose fulfilled.
Like before, when he was a pawn against military, now these so-called journalists and their followers are pawns against independent web users. Ekşi Sözlük and others are some still “unconquered territories” for the AKP leadership and they are now moving against them. [see:it looks like Turkish authorities aim to contain opposition in social media?]
let me also remind you, tomorrow government’s centralized “secure internet” filtering system begins…
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