14 DAY TRIAL // Turkey’s prime minister is on a war path against Twitter after it lost the battle to keep the site blocked following an order from the Constitutional Court.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan has switched to plan B and that’s to completely discredit the microblogging platform, accusing it of tax evasion.
Not only does the prime minister intend to go after Twitter, but he has also set eyes on Facebook and YouTube, saying that they may be breaking the law in the same way as well.
Erdogan said that Twitter, YouTube and Facebook were international companies created for profit and making money and that Twitter was a tax evader, which was why they would go after it.
“These companies, like every international company, will abide by my country’s constitution, laws and tax rules,” Erdogan said. This is the very same man who said that while he did what the Constitutional Court said, he had no respect whatsoever for the decision.
Erdogan promised a few weeks ago that he would “wipe out” Twitter. His first attempt at this led to the complete ban of the network within Turkey right before the local elections took place. Quite conveniently, Turkey said that Twitter refused to take down a bunch of links leading to compromising information on members of the ruling party.
Since people were using Google DNS and other similar services to circumvent the censorship, the country’s ISPs were forced to intercept these connections and thus to shut down a popular solution.
Not long after Twitter became inaccessible to Turks, YouTube also went down because of the same reasons, especially since the site hosted some videos in which Turkish officials discussed creating a fake reason to justify a military intervention in Syria.
The international community accused Turkey of violating basic human rights, saying that this was a setback for democracy in a country that hoped to become part of the European Union.
As mentioned, the Constitutional Court has ordered the government to lift the ban on Twitter. A few days later, a lower court issued a similar ruling regarding the ban on YouTube, which was overruled in a few hours. The original decision mentioned that the 15 videos would be censored, but the rest of the site would be open.
Google has filed a request with the Constitutional Court to order a lift of the ban just like it did with Twitter, but there’s been no response thus far.