Blocking Youtube, MySpace and Much more in Turkey 0
It was when Farmville that got blocked that it got silly. The Turkish ISPs directed by the newly formed Telecommunications Communication Presidency (TIB), blocked all access to this application from within Turkey. Of course they were not particularly concerned about blocking access to virtual farms on Facebook, it was an inadvertant result of blocking access to Farmvilles creators – Zynga. The company Zynga were deemed unacceptable because they produced some gambling and poker applications.
There are an estimated 6000+ web sites now blocked in Turkey, for a variety of reasons ranging from piracy, pornography, religion and moral. Last month two other Turkish social networking communities were blocked, the reason because they were for gay and lesbians. Youtube itself was blocked because of some videos that were put on their web site making fun of Kemal Ataturk the founder of modern Turkey.
It is in my opinion why the internet should never be censored, by all means arrest and close down criminals and plainly illegal content, but when a single organisation decides to control what a whole nation can see online it surely cannot be democratic.
It is happening across the globe, from the growing black list of web sites blocked in Australia, , the well known Great Firewall of China, to the government in Thailand trying to block anything which criticises the Thai Royal family. All across the Internet, more and more governments are either controlling or monitoring what we do online.
If you want to control what people think or what people say, of course social networking sites are a very bad idea. After all these places are specifically designed to share thoughts, experiences and opinions – but what happens when the particular state decides it doesn’t like that specific opinion?
I’m sure Kemal Ataturk would have been horrified to learn what the TIB are up to now. there’s a growing intolerance being shown in many different areas by the Turkish government inparticular towards what people see or do, thank goodness there are a myriad ways around this censorship!
If you want to read about more issues like this – visit my blog and learn how to Watch UK TV for instance, or use a real Ninja proxy
. So if you like