Much Ado About Twitter
"The shutdown of an entire social platform is unacceptable. Besides, as I have said many times before, it is technically impossible to close down communication technologies like Twitter entirely. I hope this measure will not last long."
President Abdullah Gul, Istanbul, Turkey
"Prime Minister Erdogan's move spells the lengths he will go to censor the flood of political damaging wiretap recordings circulating on social media."
Emma Sinclair-Webb, senior Turkey researcher, Human Rights Watch
"Twitter, schmitter!"
"I don't care what the international community says. Everyone will witness the power of the Turkish Republic."
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
Millions of Turks have responded to their prime minister's edict that Twitter, for them, no longer exists as a social tool with which to mock the dignity of their government. In response to which, Mr. Erdogan's collegial partner in the elite echelons of governance, the president himself, mocked him on his personal Twitter account.
The absurd spectacle of a prime minister of a first-world country living a third-world reality of tyranny, threatening to "root out Twitter" itself makes a mockery of the descent of sanity into delusion. Turkey's prime minister is raging-hot furious that his veneer of integrity has been shattered by recent revelations. Revelations brought to the fore by a long, secret investigation by police, augmented by the judiciary.
The corruption scandal that has brought his government colleagues into disrepute and which has taken the great man himself and his son into the country's burgeoning annals of recorded ill-doing has destroyed the carefully engineered image of a trustworthy and proud government ruling Turkey through grand Islamist ideals, overruling well over a century of Kemal Ataturk's democratic secularism.
Just as Mr. Erdogan rooted out the old guard in Turkey's elite levels of the military to ensure they could not foment a rebellion against the rule of the Islamist Justice & Development Party, accusing them of plotting to overthrow the government, sending 330 of Turkey's military to prison, senior commanders for life, he turned his attention as a result of the corruption scandal to arresting police and lawyers and jurists in mass arrests.
The corruption charges stem from an orchestrated slander attack by his "enemies" using social media to wage their war. In obedience to Erdogan's demand that Twitter be shut down in Turkey its telecommunications regulator defended the ban, issued, they insisted, to protect the rights of Turkish citizens as Twitter had bypassed orders to block specific accounts. While defending themselves in a Turkish court, the social platform did even more.
Instructions to Turkish users of Twitter were tweeted to Turkish users; how to bypass the closure using text messaging services in both Turkish and English. A few major Turkish newspapers where no love is lost between the Prime Minister for his repressive treatment of journalists, have published step-by-step instructions on how to bypass the shutdown using virtual private networks.
Within twelve hours of the ban the hashtag #TwitterisblockedinTurkey had been copied over a half-million times, reflecting Turkey's position as among the top ten users worldwide of the social network platform. But it is President Gul's open defiance of the Prime Minister's truculent orders that represents the real blow to Erdogan in the lead-up to local elections.
That's when, on March 30, Turks will be given the opportunity to express their dissatisfaction on the rule of their prime minister and his Islamist party. And that's when the interesting part of all this turmoil will kick into full gear.
Labels: Communication, Corruption, Internet, Social Dysfunction, Turkey
posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, March 25, 2014
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