It is now official: the Turkish Minister states their intention “to intervene” social media services…#SosyalMedyadaSansüreHayır

…and he is very upset because this might be called as “censorship”

According to Turkey’s Binali Yıldırım who is the minister in  charge of Transportation and Communication, communal tension between Turkish-Kurdish citizens in several are due to social media hatred campaigns. Thus, the Ministry aims to intervene momentarily to freeze – aka to block access to sites.  He further claims that terror activities are organized through Facebook and Twitter. Therefore, the Ministry had started to work on how to block access to social media services. This will be done in the name of “public security”. The plan is to momentarily intervene in times of emergencies. The blocking will be for a few hours or less.

This seemingly well intentional policy decision is in fact an explicit declaration of censorship. Many in the government circles had expressed their anxiety over the uncontrollable nature of social media in recent months. The PM Erdoğan is known to hate social media and frequently teases social media users. The government has already installed centralized filtering system.

This policy should also be considered in a larger context. Turkish government has been actively controlling mainstream media channels for a few years now. There are taxation threats, there are ways of feeding the media owners with non-media revenue channels, or in extreme cases there are many jailed journalists. New media in general and social media in particular is the only media venue where the control is limited. Now comes the time that authoritarian Turkish government moves onto social media control.

Unfortunately dark days ahead for us…

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Turkish ministry preparing to block Facebook and Twitter

from Hurriyet Daily News
Turkey’s Transportation, Maritime and Communication Ministry .

Turkish ministry denies reports of plan to block social media

 from Hurriyet Daily News

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