Istanbul: Turkey has unblocked access to Twitter and YouTube after they complied with an Istanbul court’s order to remove images of a slain prosecutor that authorities said promoted terrorism.
The bar on the social media sites came despite a constitutional court ruling last year against such blanket bans.
In a sign of growing tension ahead of the June 7 general election, at one point on Monday night, Turkish authorities threatened to take the unprecedented step of banning Google, the owner of YouTube. Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, which had earlier complied with the court order, have indicated they will appeal against the move.
The crackdown had followed a court ruling on Friday against 166 internet addresses, including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube as well as pages on mainstream media sites that published images of the prosecutor held hostage at gunpoint by a banned far-left group. According to an autopsy, the hostage was shot dead by his captors, who were later killed by special forces.
Yaman Akdeniz, a Turkish legal academic who successfully appealed against last year’s ban on Twitter and YouTube, argued that the ban was an attempt to intimidate media in the run-up to the June vote.
“This is a wholly disproportionate exercise,” he said. “This is intended to put pressure on social media platforms ahead of the election.” Other commentators said that propaganda images by groups such as [Daesh] have been routinely published by media in Turkey.
Ebrahim Kalin, spokesperson for Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said it would be wrong to view the social media ban as curbing freedoms. “If the media had behaved responsibly, we would not be talking about this today,” he said.
Controls over the internet have become an increasingly contentious topic in Turkey. Recently the ruling AK party pushed through legislation increasing the scope of state bodies to censor the internet. Ahmet Davutoglu, the prime minister, also denounced some media outlets for publishing photos of the slain prosecutor and last week banned them from attending the funeral.
Last year, the Turkish authorities blocked Twitter and YouTube ahead of March local elections, which were seen as a virtual referendum on Erdogan. At the time, authorities said access was blocked for alleged violation of privacy on Twitter and the leak of a sensitive national security discussion on YouTube. Erdogan had been grappling with a stream of leaked recordings on social media purportedly revealing government corruption, some of which he said were doctored.
Turkey’s constitutional court later ruled that both bans violated basic rights, but the court’s leadership has since changed.
This year Erdogan and the AK party have taken steps to tighten control ahead of June’s elections, which Erdogan hopes will return enough AK party members of parliament to formally switch the country from a parliamentary to a presidential system.
At the weekend, Erdogan signed a law that increases police powers to detain, search and wiretap people, as well as use firearms and which gives Ankara-appointed governors the right to demand detentions or investigations of specific people.
Erdogan has also signed legislation enabling state authorities to block internet content ahead of a court order, even though the constitutional court had previously ruled that a similar law was unconstitutional.
Akdeniz added that further new legislation would also require internet service providers to supply their users’ account details, which groups such as Twitter have refused to do on several occasions to date.
— Financial Times
