ISTANBUL - Turkey’s government on Friday stood by an order to block Twitter, even as many users, including some high officials, found ways to circumvent and challenge it.
“Blocking access was a court ruling, not a political decision,” said Lutfi Elvan, a government minister quoted by the semiofficial Anadolu News Agency hours after the ban was first noticed about midnight.
“Turkey is not a country prohibiting the Internet,” the minister said but added that “Twitter, YouTube and other social-media networks have to abide by the law in Turkey.”
President Abdullah Gul was among ministers and government officials who bypassed the ban Friday, using mobile devices and other methods to join a debate about the government’s measures.
“Shutting down social-media platforms cannot be approved,” Gul wrote on his Twitter account, adding that “it is not technically possible to fully block access to globally active platforms like Twitter, anyway.”
Since December, when a corruption investigation ensnared government officials and businessmen, including the son of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, social-media networks including Twitter and YouTube have become critical alternatives to traditional media outlets. Dozens of leaked phone calls and documents have been posted by unidentified critics of Erdogan, who has been in office 11 years.
Some of the leaks related to efforts by Erdogan to control the media in Turkey, where, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, 40 journalists were in jail in 2013. The prime minister was accused of making personal calls to media executives and seeking to have vocal critics fired.
One recording purported to be of the prime minister telling his son to get rid of large sums of cash on the morning of Dec. 17, when the homes of three former ministers’ sons were raided.
Erdogan has repeatedly insisted that the recordings are fakes, but independent analysts have said they are authentic.
“It seems that there is some pivotal information that the government does not wish to spread over the Internet,” said Soli Ozel, a professorof international relations at Kadir Has University in Istanbul. “Although such an effort sounds rational, it’s actually highly irrational when you consider it is impossible to stop social-media networks. My son breached the ban in 15 seconds.”
The shutdown occurred 10 days before local elections and a day after Erdogan lashed out at Twitter at an election rally, saying he did not care about international reaction if national security was at stake.
Government officials have sought to justify the attempted blockage by saying Twitter had been used to invade privacy. The Turkish telecommunications authority said Friday that the site had been blocked after citizens complained that their privacy had been breached. After Twitter refused to remove somemessages, the authority said, “there was no other choice.”
“Access to Twitter was blocked in line with court decisions to avoid the possible future victimization of citizens,” it said.
Several opposition groups threatened legal challenges. The Turkish Bar Association took the matter to court Friday, saying the blockage was unconstitutional and was in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Speaking on television, Turkey’s deputy prime minister, Ali Babacan, said he did not “think this will last too long,” Reuters reported.
Echoing other protests outside Turkey, a senior European Union official, Stefan Fule, said he was “gravely concerned” by the blockage.
“Being free to communicate and freely choose the means to do it is fundamentalEU value,” Fule said on Twitter. Fule is the union’s commissioner for enlargement.
Social-media networks in Turkey have grown more popular since anti-government demonstrations last summer, when traditional media organizations were silenced under government pressure and journalists critical of Erdogan were fired or forced to resign.
New Internet restrictions, adopted by the government in February, allowed for the swift closing of websites or removal of content by court order.
Jim Prosser, a spokesman for Twitter, said the company was “looking into” the ban, adding, “That’s all we have for the moment.” In Twitter messages, the company urged people to use mobile connections to get back on the service.
Front Section, Pages 7 on 03/22/2014