Court Orders Turkish Twitter Ban Temporarily Lifted, Twitter Prepares Challenge 29
redletterdave (2493036) writes "Less than a week after the Turkish government banned Twitter over failing to remove allegations of government corruption from the social network, a Turkish court on Wednesday suspended the ban, calling it 'illegal.'"
Unfortunately, according to the BBC Twitter may remain blocked until after the elections: "The administrative court in Ankara issued a temporary injunction on Wednesday ordering the TIB to restore access to Twitter until it could deliver its full verdict on the ban. Turkish media reports suggested the ban would be suspended soon afterwards but a source in Mr Erdogan's office told Reuters news agency the TIB had 30 days to implement or appeal against the court ruling."
In the meantime, Twitter is attempting to fight the ban directly.
If Twitter wants to do something useful (Score:4, Interesting)
They should help provide information and methods of circumvention to help ensure that no state can block them. Going through the courts is just workfare for the lawyers.
Check this out from the last link: (Score:4, Interesting)
"The last order instructed us to take down an account accusing a former minister of corruption. This order causes us concern. Political speech is among the most important speech, especially when it concerns possible government corruption. That’s why today we have also petitioned the Turkish court on behalf of our users to reverse this order.
While we contest the order, we are using our Country Withheld Content tool on the account in question, the first time we’ve used it in Turkey, as well as on several Tweets based on the public prosecutor’s request regarding the safety of an individual. The tool allows content to be withheld in a specific jurisdiction while remaining visible to the rest of the world."
Although I did not find the specific tweet on http://chillingeffects.org/int... [chillingeffects.org]
Re:If Twitter wants to do something useful (Score:5, Interesting)
They should help provide information and methods of circumvention to help ensure that no state can block them. Going through the courts is just workfare for the lawyers.
Twitter feeds can be viewed via other websites. Take Wordpress (the software, not the site), which has numerous twitter plugins. You cannot block all individual sites that have these feeds. Turkey cannot prevent those sites from using twitter as long as those sites are hosted outside Turkey. I thought this was common practise in Iran and Libya and other countries that tried to block twitter since the revolutions in the islamic world.
Twitter ban in Egypt caused revolution (Score:4, Interesting)
Tayyip Erdoan isn't stupid. In fact he's one of the better recent Turkish leaders, but he's a conservative [not crazy] Muslim.
He's not following events in Egypt. When Hosni Mubarak saw all the excitement about Twitter messaging, he banned Twitter to stop the tweets. So the tweeters did the best thing to get the word out. They left their homes and businesses to rally in the streets--real, not virtual interaction--since virtual contact was shut down.
That was the beginning of the "Arab Spring" and the downfall of Mubarak. Erdoan needs to be more confident about the future and stop listening to the religious conservative extremists, so he won't make all the same mistakes as Mubareak. Turkey is more forward-thinking than that, or at least it was, until Erdoan got spooked [stupid]. http://www.todayszaman.com/new... [todayszaman.com]