As many of you may have heard over the course of the past month, Twitter was banned in Turkey. The reason for this ban was because a few anonymous Twitter accounts had been leaking audio recordings of top Turkish officials talking about corruption and other sensitive issues. Since the lifting of the ban on Twitter in Turkey, the government has been working directly with Twitter to resolve the issue of these undesired tweets. As it seems right now, there are currently two solutions in the works that will allow Twitter to operate in harmony with the current government.
Those two measures include giving the Turkish government the ability to ban or filter certain tweets from ever appearing via a filtering system that seeks out ‘malicious content‘. In addition to the malicious content filtering and the likely effective banning of certain phrases on Twitter, the company has agreed to remove at least two accounts that have been know to disseminate anti-government materials and partially responsible for the audio leaks that originally kicked off these events to begin with.
Considering how important social media has become in helping organize certain political movements and share the experiences of others aross the world, it is really disheartening to see Twitter bend over backwards in order to satisfy a government that seeks to silence its people. A government that was once considered to be a democracy, is now seeking to ban people’s ability to express themselves over Twitter. This is a horrible step back for Twitter, as they are now actively participating in state sponsored censorship and have effectively given the government everything that they want short of shutting down Twitter. In fact, it may be more beneficial for the Turkish Government to suppress tweets rather than trying to block twitter Altogether.
