Twitter is blocked in Turkey

Many sites including Youtube did get blocked in the past, but safe to say this one is different. It is an explicit attempt to silence non-traditional media by the government. They have been working on controlling the traditional media (TV, newspapers, etc.) for a long time.

Recently, social media has been making a bigger impact, hence the explicit play. Current administration sees itself in an existential struggle and willing to do anything to stay in power. The model that they aspire seems to have switched from the west to Russia/China.

Whether they will be able to succeed in silencing social media will have implications beyond Turkey.

I was there on business in 2010 and I said "man, this is a country on the move! We need to set up an office here." English is taught from early grades, there is good infrastructure in the western part of the country, a young, educated population with a relatively small domestic economy - great place to outsource and a bridge between europe and asia. Things have fallen apart so quickly since then - wouldn't touch it now. Hope things get back on track, as there is so much potential.

Internet is falling apart. I think that appreciation for free speech, press and freedom of expression is lower today than it was for a long time of recent history. "They" just push and push on it and we're helpless. Not even constrained by paying it lip service.

Do we still have non-violent ways to counter this and make our voice heard? Because otherwise violent ways become aspired.

Background info:

This is hypothesized to be a reaction to a series of audio recordings that were anonymously released over time. These were ridiculously damning, clearly someone is tapping phones without anyone else's knowledge.

Previously:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/27/turkish-pm-corr... http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/iw/contents/articles/origina... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_corruption_scandal_in_Turk...

Some highlights from the "alleged" recordings so far:

- PM calling to get news about an opposing party removed from a TV channel multiple times

- Modifying political poll results to manipulate public opinion

- Getting people of opposing opinions fired

- Buying a large paper shredder to destroy documents

- PM calling son to ask how much money there is at home, son replies saying about 1 trillion, then switches to 3-5 kurush (cents in turkish).

- PM calling son to say "they're raiding the houses, zero out the money". Son says there's only 30 million euros left.

- Call to order the judges to be fixed, and says that a specific person is to be imprisoned.

- Trying to manipulate who goes on the supreme court.

- Says "ignore the prosecutor who's running the corruption investigations". Orders documents ripped up.

(source: http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/yazarlar/25981622.asp)

The official reason for the shutdown is that there were sexual photos of some poor citizen released on twitter against her will, and she complained but twitter refused to take them down. So they decided to shut down the entire website. Yeah, right.

Of course this is ominous that at the end of this month, the local elections will take place. No coincidence.

It's surreal how all this is going down. It's like watching a conspiracy theory movie. Blatant shills everywhere, media manipulation abounds, blatant lies heard on TV from the horse's mouth. We were all skeptical already, it's inevitable when you live in a third world country for years, but wow. When you hear the insiders actually talking to each other, it's a whole new level.

more news on this specific event: http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/turkey-blocks-twitter-after... http://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/2014/03/turkey-erdogan-...

Related old post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7189577

edit: Erdogan stated a few days ago that he didn't care what the world thought, and he would eradicate twitter. He said "how dare they listen to our encrypted phone conversations". It's expected that on the 25th, something huge is going to be released that might sway the elections bigtime. Whoever is posting these are doing it slowly and deliberately, a few days at a time, building up anticipation. So people think that twitter getting shut down is probably related to this.

edit2: All recordings were put on youtube by someone: https://www.youtube.com/user/haramzadeler333

Imagine if government had the power to flick a switch place perfect earplugs and blinders on every human everywhere for a time for some political agenda.

I wonder how far men would go (short of just killing people) to suppress the right for people to think, in order to suppress some information floating around in the public space.

Would you flick that switch, to power down an entire nation of drones, just to prevent them from finding out that you did something evil?

Take care you NEVER give other men the right to shut down your brain from afar. It WILL be used against you.

Earlier today "Turkey’s Erdogan Now Says He’ll Shut Down Twitter, Too" http://time.com/32339/turkey-erdogan-twitter/

I just tried pinging twitter with this tool, the turkey server seems to work:

http://cloudmonitor.ca.com/en/ping.php?vtt=1395356295&vargho...

but china, egypt, and interestingly panama don't. I'd love to report on this but it's hard to prove this kind of thing. any ideas? (i'm also contacting twitter)

edit: here's my story -

http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/twitter-blocked-nat...

please let me know if you see anything wrong. (we're aware of the turkish character issues...sigh)

DNS based block at the moment, IP based one will follow for sure. Please remember that YouTube was also banned for a couple of years in the past [1].

This is related to the corruption scandal in Turkey, Tayyip Erdogan's government is trying to stop the release of leaked tapes on social media.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_YouTube#.C2.A0Tur...

Unfortunately Erdogan is out of control, they use DNS based blocking. I'm using a VPN service so I can access Twitter, Youtube and other services easily but in our country probably 0.01% has VPN so this is serious.

Ah, blocking twitter, the last refuge of despots[1].

http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/25/twitter-blocked-egypt/

For the time being, Twitter is accessable from within Turkey using the DNS of the biggest ISPs of Turkey, 195.175.39.39

Twitter has been playing a pivotal role in connecting people and getting the word out via an unbiased medium. The effect of twitter has been phenomenal over the past few years in countries that have undergone political revolution. Much of the reality that the citizens need to know are blacked out by mainstream media because it's controlled by the government & corporations who are hand in glove.

Unfortunately, many countries have resorted to a simple fix of policing twitter. Second unfortunate thing is that twitter is still restricted to the tech savvy crowd. There's still a sizable population outside third world that don't know what it is & how to use it. But as long as we have un-policed social media tools, we might see large scale cleaning in the coming decades.

The real question is why Erdogan took risk an blocked Twitter just 10 days before elections? The only reason I see is this Twitter account with almost 500.000 followers who is revealing government corruption: https://twitter.com/FuatAvni For English version of his tweets see: https://twitter.com/FuatAvniEng (usually translation is delayed 1-2 weeks)

Reminds me of this scene from Pirates of Silicon Valley:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b27Mf6wTZ3w

"It’s about power. It’s like those weird countries man where the army guys overthrow the president. The first thing that they take over is the way people communicate; radio, tv, newspapers. Information is power."

Turkish army has nothing to do with this case of course.

Crucial services that can be choked off need to be made seamlessly (zero thinking UX) available via overlay networks (tor, etc).

IOW, if twitter is blocked, there should be a browser plugin / standard thing that fires itself up and automatically reconnects through said overlay network.

Because right now, a single domain is a SPoF that govts can flick a switch and neuter most of their populace's communication.

Irony: Twitter ban being spread to the world via Twitter itself. A perfect example of how powerful the internet is despite of the governments.

I'm from Istanbul, and I love how this block makes my pro-govt friends say "Why did they do this?". Twitter is (was?) used extensively in Turkey, and I feel like this block will end up with the government shooting itself in the foot by showing their supporters how sad the things they do are. There's no explanation for this block, and there can't ever be.

Just when you think Turkey is a 1st world country...

This is really a shocking news for all the twitter users from Turkey. They should raise voice against it. by http://www.etunescafe.com

Sitting in Ataturk airport right now and twitter is working fine.

Something has to be done before this sets an example for other governments. Freedom cannot be taken away from anyone.

This is so ridiculous. As if someone can't just set up a domain themselves and release the shit.

Lots of things happening around the Black Sea these days. Sochi Olympics, Crimea and now Turkey.

Does anyone know how it's currently blocked? twitter IP's, BGP or DNS?

turkey made a lot of progress recently. too bad it will all go down the drain like this.

^ Requesting namecoin based app

sad to see sites being blocked. Can you use Tor to get around this restriction?

Bullshit. I was tweeting from Istanbul just 3 days ago.

Many people would see this as a good thing.

It's just a big site run by some American company. Amazingly, there are other ways to communicate.

Then use Twister [1]. Twister is NSA-proof, censorship reistant, and based on the bitcoin protocol.

[1] http://twister.net.co/

There are two sides of the coin.

1) In this day and age shutting down Twitter wholesale is simply a silly and undemocratic move. Information can not be blocked and will find its way around anyway. Like many people I am against it.

2) There is a blatant violation of personal rights of people by fabricated phone-tapes. You take it to the court and court decides that these are illegal, and ask the service provider (in this case Twitter) to take down those specific twits. They don't comply. What do you do?

Say there's a link for a fabricated phone conversation of Obama betraying the country disseminated using Twitter. The administration take it to the court and win the legal battle. Could Twitter afford not to comply? Can this happen?

This is the gist of the problem people are having over there.