Rule of law: Turkish court nixes government Twitter ban ... for now A court in Turkey's capital has ordered the lifting of the government ban on Twitter in the restless nation. The administrative court in Ankara overturned the week-long ban on Wednesday in response to complaints by journalists’ unions and the country's Bar Association, representing its lawyers, that blocking Twitter …
Haha, so how long until he locks up all of those involved in this appeal decision for corruption and plotting against the government. Turkey, on the western side, is a lovely place and I used to be in a relationship with a Turkish girl. There biggest problem is that most of the west leans towards the west while most of the east leans towards the east and strict Islamic values. The two do not match and they will never agree a middle ground so there will be trouble. There is one thing that I hope Turkey manages to do though and that's vote the current cretin in power out of power.
I just love the smell of internet freedom in the morning.......
Happy to see that so much reactive VPN, TOR and proxy finger-voting took place in Turkey in response to the ban.
Overall, Turkey is a fairly nice place (with a few problems) compared to some of its neighbours. As usual, it is the politicians who are in need of a good lesson, as opposed to the tweetosphere
And a salient lesson for us all. Viva la libertad!
I think every country should ban Twitter (and/or Facebook) at least once a year. That way, the people will learn how fragile their 'essential service' is and will also learn how to use VPNs, TOR, etc. One way to 'sell' this to government would be to explain that it would increase 'national resilience' (a good thing) in case the country comes under cyber attack (a bad thing).
When will these governments learn?
As any good tyrant knows, you want people complaining that you're corrupt. You want it to happen frequently, and with as much vitriol as possible. The correct counter to these complaints is to balance the economy so that the proles are just comfortable enough that they won't actually act on this information.
You need to inure the general populace to the idea of your corruption, so that new reports of your evils appear to be old hat. When the general population react to your ever-widening net of influence with complete apathy, you're ready for the next stage.
There is a very good post over at https://medium.com/technology-and-society/cb596ce5f27 by Zeynep Tufecki. She argues that Turkey is not really intending to block Twitter per se, because the Turkish Administration knows that to be largely futile (and it pushes the populace towarrds using avoiding technologies such as VPNs and Tor to bypass the problem). Rather, she says that Erdogan is attempting to "poison the well" of social media by painting it as a threat to family values in Turkey. She notes that Erdogan has talked about social media's disruption of privacy, and how the foreign companies do not obey Turkish court orders but obey US and European courts.
Well worth reading.
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