Why does Turkey Block Farmville and Youtube?
It was when farmville that got blocked that it got silly. Under directions of the newly formed Telecommunications Communication Presidency (TIB), the Turkish ISPs 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. It was the fact that Zynga produced gambling and poker applications that was deemed as unacceptable..
There are an estimated 6000+ web sites now blocked in Turkey, for a variety of reasons ranging from piracy, pornography, religion and moral. In fact last month two other Turkish social networking sites were blocked, simply because they were for lesbian and gay users.. Certain videos of Kemal Ataturk, led to Youtube being blocked by Turkey as well..
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 a trend, governments are increasingly monitoring and controlling what we do online.. All across the Internet, more and more governments are either controlling or monitoring what we do online.
When you seek to control a population, social networking makes it much harder.. 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 certain Kemal Ataturk would not have approved of the clumsy censorship of the TIB.. 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’re interested you can read more about Internet filtering here. Or to learn about staying anonymous here.
Tags: blocked proxies, blocked youtube, internet censorship, websites blocked, youtube blocked