Etiket censorship

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 […]