Turkey is once again in the news with yet another ban of a famous website. While they banned all of Youtube for videos that made fun of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk they now decided to ban Wordpress.com because of a handful of blogs that supposedly insulted the Turkish creationist Adnan Oktar.
Heise, a respected German computer magazin were the first to report about the ban. The news, which is unfortunately only available in German, does not reveal a source other than that it was reported by the dpa, the German Press Agency.
M&C have more information about the case:
Turkish Internet users attempting to access more than a million Wordpress.com sites are now redirected to a site which says in Turkish and English, ‘Access to this site has been suspended in accordance with decision no: 2007/195 of T.C. Fatih 2.Civil Court of First Instance.’Kerim Kalkan, a lawyer for Oktar said that the court first ordered Turk Telecom to block a couple of specific sites but the authors of the sites soon moved the allegedly libelous content to other Wordpress sites.
‘It was when this happened that we applied to the court to order that all websites of Wordpress be blocked,’ Kalkan told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
My personal opinion is that this is a typical overreaction showing once again that Turkey is not ready to become a member of the European Union.
Update: Official Wordpress.com information released in blog post. Why we are banned in Turkey
source: Heise (German only)
additional information: Monsters and Critics (English)
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