Censorship: Turkish PM, President tangle over Bruited ban on Facebook, Youtube

[unhappycamper]

http://www.juancole.com/2014/03/shooting-messenger-facebook.html

Censorship: Turkish PM, President tangle over Bruited ban on Facebook, Youtube
By Juan Cole | Mar. 8, 2014

President Abdullah Gul has rejected a suggestion by Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan that Turkey might ban Facebook and Twitter. Nearly half of Turkey’s 77 million people use Facebook at least once a month and the country ranks 15th in the world for Facebook use. Turkey had banned Youtube 2008-2010.

The good news is that Gul stepped in to nix the authoritarian step proposed by Erdogan, which recalls the policies of regional dictators such as Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad (even they had to back away from such bans because of a public backlash).

The bad news is that Gul is outgoing as president and may be replaced by… Tayyip Erdogan.

More bad news: One reason Gul gave for rejecting a global ban is that Turkey now has among the world’s most repressive internet laws and the government can ban websites one by one. So what Gul is saying is not that free speech will be maintained on social media but rather you don’t need to ban the Facebook domain as a whole because the government can ban individual sites within it. That’s very bad.

[bemildred]

1. They must be in deep shit domestically. nt