14 DAY TRIAL // The Twitter censorship efforts in Turkey have begun. After the company bowed down to the country’s government last week, choosing to censor some messages rather than go dark for the entire user community in Turkey, two accounts are now blocked.
The two accounts belong to people who were accused of disseminating information that implicates that Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and other government officials are guilty of corruption. @HARAMZADELER333 has some 535,000 followers, while @BASCALAN has over 430,000 followers.
Both accounts can be seen from elsewhere in the world just fine, but Turkish users can no longer view their content. Instead, their profiles have been marked with a “Withheld account” message, while their messages appear marked as well.
All the tweets now read “account has been withheld in: Turkey,” complete with the user name. According to Twitter’s policy, this type of messages only appear when a certain country’s government has taken steps, including by obtaining a court order.
Twitter @HARAMZADELER333 ve @BASCALAN hesablarına Türkiyədən girişinə qadağa qoydu. Viva La North Turkey) pic.twitter.com/mWEqcMdt3r
— Perviz Hacıyev (@haciyev) April 19, 2014
People can still view the censored accounts if they use VPN tools or change their DNS, but these are solutions that are often too complicated for the regular Internet user and that’s what the Turkish government is counting on.
“We don't withhold content at the mere request of a gov't official and we may appeal a court order when it threatens freedom of expression,” reads a message posted through Twitter’s “Policy” account, hinting at the fact that the company may have not yet given up on fighting for the Turkish users and their freedom of speech.
“Twitter has not provided and will not provide user information to Turkish authorities without valid legal process,” reads yet another message, showing that Twitter is trying to ease the minds of concerned users.
Twitter has been facing a lot of troubles in Turkey in the past couple of months. The microblogging platform was first blocked just a few days after Erdogan promised to “wipe out” Twitter. This also happened ahead of the local elections where the ruling party was hoping to get as many votes as possible.
Of course, hiding proof of the government’s corruption was essential, so Twitter fell victim, while YouTube joined soon after as it refused to remove videos showing Turkish officials discussing how best to make up a story that would justify military intervention in Syria.
Now that Twitter has been unblocked following an order from the Constitutional Court, the government is trying to find other ways to force the company into complying with its wishes.