It was when they blocked Farmville that it started to get really silly.. The Turkish ISPs directed by the newly formed Telecommunications Communication Presidency (TIB), blocked all access to this application from within Turkey. The problem was not with virtual farms, but the creator of the application – Zynga.. The company Zynga were deemed unacceptable because they produced some gambling and poker applications.
As it stands there are now well over 6000 web sites, being blocked in Turkey for a variety of reasons including pornography, piracy, religion and moral reasons.. 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 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.
Of course if you seek to control a population, social networking sites are very bad news.. 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’re interested you can read more about Internet filtering here. Or to learn about staying anonymous here.