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Turkey has taken a tough stance on social media
under President Tayyip Erdogan and the ruling AK Party he
founded, temporarily stopping access to some sites last year and
making it easier for authorities to introduce such bans.
In the second half of last year alone, Turkey filed more than
five times more content-removal requests to Twitter than any
other country, data from the micro-blogging company shows.
Both Twitter and video-sharing service YouTube were inaccessible
for hours on Monday, after a Turkish court ordered the removal
of images of a prosecutor held at gunpoint by far-left
militants.
Facebook, the first of the three to comply with the court order,
appeared to have avoided the ban. Representatives of both
Twitter and Facebook have said they would launch an appeal.
Google, which owns YouTube, did not immediately respond to a
request for comment.
"The laws are being used as weapons by authorities," said Mehmet
Ali Koksal, a lawyer specializing in IT cases. "The government
says 'I will shut you down if you don't remove so and so'. If
this were between two people it would be called blackmail."
A spokesman for Erdogan said on Monday that a prosecutor had
demanded the ban because some media organizations had acted "as
if they were spreading terrorist propaganda" in sharing the
images of the hostage-taking.
The prosecutor in the photos, Mehmet Selim Kiraz, was killed in
a shoot-out between hostage-takers and police last week.
(Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk and Can Sezer; Writing by David
Dolan; Editing by Louise Ireland)
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