Turkey Keeps Fighting Twitter

[reaper]

Taking into account an election result which shows that most Turks do not care if their government is corrupt, the Turkish Prime Minister simply slammed a constitutional court ruling which lifted a ban on Twitter. While he is currently purging the state of anyone who disagrees with him, the constitutional court may find itself on his list as well.
Prime Minister claimed that the court should have rejected a request to restore access to the micro-blogging website. He was cited in the news before departing on a trip to Azerbaijan that although the government did comply with the ruling, he didn’t respect it.

Apparently, Twitter’s appeal should have been rejected on procedural grounds. We remind that access to Twitter was blocked last month in the run-up to national elections, but the country’s telecoms authority had to lift the 2-week-old ban after the court ruled the block breached freedom of speech.

Turkish Prime Minister wanted the service offline so that opposition groups would stop using it in order to point out a corruption scandal that involved both Prime Minister and his ministers. The government had managed to silence the press, but couldn’t stop people chatting about it online.

Unfortunately, his electoral base is in the less well-connected poorer regions of the country, and his voters didn’t actually care about corruption or whatever, so Prime Minister did well in the elections.

Ironically enough, that means that all the politician has to do to become incredibly popular is be nicer to the well educated parts of country and allow more free speech. Perhaps, for Turkey this way is “too easy”.