Yesterday Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan announced that Twitter would be 'stamped out' and last night the government tried to block access to Twitter in Turkey.
This morning, though, Turkish President Gül TWEETED his response and wrote that banning Twitter was not acceptable and also not possible, stating that only specific pages or accounts could be blocked and only with a court order.
In the meantime, the Deputy Prime Minister continued to Tweet, in spite of the government's attempts to ban Twitter.
As all this was going on, the head of the Turkish Bar Association filed a criminal complaint against those responsible for putting the ban in place and those who ordered it on the grounds that these actions are clearly illegal. He also urged all Twitter users (more than 10,000,000) in Turkey to go to the offices of their local prosecutors and file similar complaints.
And, many Turkish newspapers have been publishing articles explaining how Twitter users can get around the ban.
And then, there's the news (as far as I can figure out, today's news is so bizarre that it makes my head spin):
- that the two court orders cited by the government as justification for banning Twitter are only for the blocking of two Twitter accounts,
- and that the prosecutor, whose order is also cited by the government as justification, has released a statement that no such order was issued by his office,
- and that the other prosecutor's order which the government has also cited as justification is from a prosecutor's office which doesn't exist.
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There have been many statements released and Tweeted by US and EU officials regarding this attempt to ban Twitter, but I just don't have the time to link to them.