Genel

Internet censorship threatens Turkey’s reputation

Yazan: HaberVs

Karen Schewina Instead of looking at their growing magic beans and happy chicken, Farmville users had to read the following message, when they wanted to enter their account on the morning of October 3rd: “After technical analysis and legal evaluation based on the catalog crimes of the Law no 5651, Administrative measure has been taken […]

Karen Schewina

Instead of looking at their growing magic beans and happy chicken, Farmville users had to read the following message, when they wanted to enter their account on the morning of October 3rd: “After technical analysis and legal evaluation based on the catalog crimes of the Law no 5651, Administrative measure has been taken for this website (zynga.com) according to decision no 421.02.02.2009-272446 dated 02/10/2009 of ‘Telekomünikasyon İletişim Başkanlığı’ (Telecommunications Directorate) TIB.”

As the company, which has developed Farmville, YoVille, Vampires, Mafia Wars, as well as a poker application for facebook, was accused of promoting illegal gambling, all of its websites were blocked by the Telecommunications Directorate in an attempt to protect the Turkish citizens. In this case it was not a court issued decision, but an administrative one, so it was not possible to get any statement from the people responsible during the weekend. The decision was highly criticized and caused uproar on the facebook itself, until the site was available again on Sunday night.

This example seems to be typical for the strategy of the Telecommunications Directorate dealing with critical content published online: if there is one suspicion being expressed, their reaction is to block the main page as well as all the subdomains, as it happened to WordPress and Google Groups, blogspot and blogger. Not accessible are as well Youporn, The Pirate Bay, Megaupload, Deezer, Virb, Dailymotion, Tagged, Netlog, Slide, CareerBuilder and Alibaba – a complete list of the websites can be found under www.engelliweb.com.

“Reporters without borders” states that all in all 1,309 websites have been rendered inaccessible by the Telecommunications Directorate since November 2007, only 270 of them by court order the rest by administrative decision. All of the websites have been blocked according to the Law 5651 on “the organization of online publications and combating offences committed by such publications”, which went into force in November 2007. It allows prosecutors to block access nationwide if a site’s content is being suspected of promoting or showing explicitly suicide , pedophilia, drug abuse, obscenity or prostitution, or violate the law which forbids insulting Atatürk, founder of the Turkish Republic according to a law passed in 1951.

Banning sites of a pornographic or pedophile nature or those that promote drug abuse was justified by the Minister of Communications, Binali Yıldırım, who commented that the law “is not against the internet as a medium, but it is the task of the state to protect families, children and teenagers”. “Reporters without borders” criticizes that banning sites because of content that is in some way critical of Atatürk violates free expression, “as Atatürk is dead, he cannot be deemed as suffering from moral damage”.

YouTube has been banned since May 2008, when primitively designed videoclips appeared, showing Atatürk as a belly dancer or with radiant make-up. Court cases are pending against Facebook, Google Sites and other sites. Though YouTube has been blocked several times since May 2008, CNN Türk reports that more than 1.5 million people access the platform every day. Websites like vtunnel.com or ktunnel.com guide the interested user through the installation of a program that allows using the forbidden websites as last.fm, myspace or blogspot.

Blocking access to popular social networking sites is considered to damage Turkey’s reputation whatever the reasons behind such decisions are. Therefore, Turkey is ranked 102nd out of 173 countries in the 2008 Reporters Without Borders press freedom index, followed by Tajikistan, Uganda and Peru but at the same time lagging behind for example Kenya, Moldavia or Honduras.

In the “Turkey Progress Report 2009”,published on October 14th by the Commission of the European Communities, the “frequent website bans” are seen as a “cause for concern”, as “judicial and administrative decisions block the entire website instead of filtering out unwanted content”. The members of the commission perceive an “increasingly open and free debate in Turkish society, including issues traditionally perceived as “sensitive” and stress that “Article 301 of the Turkish Criminal Code should not be used systematically to restrict freedom of expression”.

All in all though “Turkish law does not sufficiently guarantee freedom of expression in line with the ‘European Court of Human Rights’ case law”, as “political pressures on the media and legal uncertainties affect freedom of the press in practice”.

Cyberlaw Blog states that about more than 6000 websites are unavailable, counting private weblogs as well. They provide their followers with a statistic saying that currently, under the provisions of Law No. 5651 access to over 3000 websites is blocked. In terms of official statistics, it was revealed by TIB that as of 11 May, 2009, 2601 websites are blocked in Turkey under the provisions of Law No. 5651. While 475 (18%) of the 2601 websites are blocked by court orders, the majority, with 2126 websites (82%), are blocked via administrative blocking orders issued by TIB. In terms of the 475 court orders so far, 121 websites are currently blocked because they were deemed obscene (Article 226 of the Turkish Penal Code), 54 websites are blocked because they involved sexual exploitation and abuse of children (Article 103(1) of the Turkish Penal Code), 19 websites are blocked because of provision of gambling (Article 228 of the Turkish Penal Code), 20 are blocked because they involved betting, and 54 websites were ordered to be blocked in relation to crimes committed against Atatürk (Law No. 5816, dated 25/7/1951). 32 of these 54 blocking orders were recurring orders involving approximately 17 websites (majority involved YouTube) issued by different courts around the country. Furthermore, 5 websites were blocked in relation to prostitution (Article 227, Turkish Criminal Code), and one website was ordered to be blocked in relation to the facilitation of the use of drugs (Article 190 of the Turkish Penal Code).

More interestingly, 197 websites were blocked by courts for reasons outside the scope of Law No. 5651 but the detailed breakdown for these orders was not provided by TIB. It is however understood that TIB executed the blocking orders even though they do not involve the list of crimes listed in Article 8. The number of websites blocked outside the scope of Article 8 by the courts was 69 in May 2008 but reached nearly 200 by end of May 2009.

http://cyberlaw.org.uk/2009/09/22/at-least-6000-websites-censored-from-turkey/
http://cyberlaw.org.uk/2009/10/04/from-farmville-to-gayville-internet-censorship-continues-in-turkey/
http://www.ifex.org/turkey/2009/10/14/two_sites_unblocked/
http://www.reporter-ohne-grenzen.de/ranglisten/rangliste-2008.html

http://www.netzpolitik.org/2008/internetzensur-in-der-tuerkei/
https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/olacrf/20091014Elarg/TR_Rapport_to_press_13_10.pdf
http://engelliweb.com/

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