Turkish Government Blocks Twitter After Corruption Leaks

After some audio leaks that led to claims of government corruption became available on Twitter, Turkey’s elected Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that he would “wipe out” the social network. These recordings were anonymously posted to Twitter and effectively implicated those within the Prime Minister’s very own inner circle. Considering the fact that RTE and Turkey are members of NATO, I don’t necessarily see any rockets flying towards Twitter’s headquarters here in San Francisco any time soon. However, there are already reports that the Turkish government has forced ISPs to block Twitter across the country with many reporting that the site is unreachable.

This is merely a ploy by the Turkish government’s leadership to stem the tide of protests that have been coming and going within the country, mostly fueled by social networks like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. All of which have been organizing places for many of the past protests in Turkey against the government. The amazing part about all of this is that the Prime Minister is effectively acting like a dictator (even though he already has been) even though he is technically a democratically elected leader. Not just that, but he is clearly overstepping his boundaries as a leader of the government in order to protect his own interests, as the Twitter ban clearly indicates.

Furthermore, it appears that protesters are going around the city spray painting Google’s DNS address on political posters of the ruling party. Since the Turkish government resorted to a DNS poisoning in order to block Twitter, simply using Google’s DNS or OpenDNS should allow for Twitter to be usable within Turkey. However, as I had discussed this with a friend, it will be merely a matter of time until the Turkish Government blocks Google DNS as well in order to prevent such a workaround. You can also send your tweets via SMS, however, many people probably won’t do that considering how many are likely used to tweeting from their Twitter apps.

Hopefully this isn’t a slippery slope in Turkey and that the Turkish Government’s actions don’t affect other users around the world, much like when Pakistan decided that they would block YouTube, causing YouTube to go down globally.

Original Author: Anshel Sag

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