Turkey has once again banned access to the video portal Youtube. Access to the website Youtube was blocked in Turkey after a court oder on Thursday. Turkish users seem to receive a message explaining the ban of Youtube. The reason for the third ban are once again videos that make fun of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder and first President of the Republic of Turkey.
Turkey bans Wordpress.com
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.
Youtube removed videos and Turkey lifts ban
Youtube decided to remove the videos that had been posted on the site earlier on which led to the complete ban of the website ordered by a Turkish court. The main question that arises from the series of events is of course if Youtube made the right decision by removing the video in question. Or to bring this into a broader perspective: Should a website give in to the demands of a third party to remove content because it might be considered offensive to that party ?
And so the Pirates win the day
It began with the ban of the Russian website allofmp3 by the internet provider Perspektiv. The Piratebay decided to ban users of the provider from accessing their website as a response of the ban against allofmp3. Guess what, Perspektiv announced today that they lifted the ban of the Russian website and the Piratebay in turn decided to lift their ban as well.
How to bypass Internet Censorship
If you are looking for a comprehensive, and I mean really really comprehensive, guide on bypassing internet censorship you might want to take a look at the excellent guide written by Freerk. The guide is divided into two parts; The first analyzes different methods to censor information on the internet and the second part describes different ways to bypass censorship.
