14 DAY TRIAL // After Twitter, Turkey has decided to ban YouTube as well, after clips showing the intelligence chief discussing military actions in Syria have been published online.
While it’s not yet clear whether Turkish authorities have contacted Google and tried to remove the videos, it appears that the service is no longer available to local users unless they turn to proxies or any other methods to access blocked services.
Google hasn’t yet issued a statement on this, but several users confirmed on Twitter that YouTube seems to be completely blocked across Turkey.
This could be a bit weird for many EU and US citizens, but Turkey has made it a common practice to block web services revealing government secrets that weren’t supposed to be made public, but users obviously already found several ways to bypass restrictions.
According to a report by Reuters, a YouTube user posted on Thursday a video showing Turkey’s intelligence chief discussing with the foreign minister and the deputy head of armed forces on a possible military intervention in Syria.
Intelligence Chief Hakan Fidan, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, and Deputy Chief of Staff Yasar Guler have all refused to comment on the video, but given today’s decision to block YouTube completely, it was most likely legitimate and showing a real conversation between the mentioned Turkish officials.
While everyone is waiting for some official statements and more information on what caused the complete ban of YouTube in Turkey, there’s no doubt that access to the service is expected to be restored very soon, as local officials are most likely discussing with Google on ways to remove the leaked videos from the web as we speak.
Turkey was probably trying to get more time to take the videos off the Internet, so banning the service completely in the country is expected to reduce the impact of a leaked government conversation among civilians.
That’s not going to happen and everybody knows it and although Turkey will probably manage to remove the video in the coming days, be sure that it’ll be published all over the web very soon.
A few days ago, Turkey also decided to block Twitter and even though the majority of users were turning to proxies to access the service, a court order forced authorities to lift all restrictions and make it available in the country once again. The same is expected to happen to YouTube too, unless the government restores access before a court order asks it to do so.