Turkey Turns Its Blocking Eyes to YouTube

TURKEY—Social media tends to send a very clear message to nations that still think they can successfully keep their citizens muzzled: "We can do this the easy way or the hard way." Turkey, a nation that should know better, has apparently decided on the latter course with its most recent decision, hot on the heels of its banning of Twitter, to now ban YouTube. In fact, according to the BBC, Prime Minster Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan "suggested earlier that bans could be applied to both YouTube and Facebook." The mess is only getting messier, however. Twitter has filed an official challenge to the ban, which was put into effect earlier this month for reasons that range from protecting the populace from porn to the social network's failure to abide by court rulings, and on Wednesday, a court ordered the country's telecom authority to lift the ban on Twitter, though the BBC reports that "it could be weeks before the order takes effect." Now, while all of that is happening, the government doubles down on social media following what appears to be the leak of an "audio recording of Turkish officials discussing Syria." The news agency added, "Reuters news agency, which examined the recording, said it could not verify its authenticity but it was potentially the most damaging purported leak so far as it appeared to have originated from the bugging of a highly confidential and sensitive conversation." As with any leak of sensitive (i.e. embarrassing) information concerning government officials, crackdowns tend to follow, though it is rare to see the wholesale banning of an entire network. In this case, the BBC article suggests that ErdoÄŸan is attempting to dampen any negative fallout that might influence "important local elections on Sunday." Unfortunately for that effort, however, by bringing increased attention through a ban to audio recordings he did not want propagated, the prime minister probably added to the number of eyeballs seeking out that very content. Similarly, the announcement of such a ban is usually greeted with enhanced attempts to broach said ban, the solidity of which is often questionable anyway. To be sure, while the BCC notes that, "As conflicting reports emerged over the blockage, the search engine Google, which owns YouTube, confirmed that some users were unable to access YouTube in Turkey," what we read into that is that the blockade is probably more like a sieve than a catchall, which may lead to more onerous crackdowns on speech by the government. One certain take-away from the move to ban YouTube, though, is that it works to expose the true political underpinnings for these bans, and puts the lie to recent claims by government officials that it was done to protect the people from porn. As far as social media goes, however, the reason doesn't matter. Porn or politics, it makes no difference to the platforms, which repeat their warning with cold, self-assured abandon: "Your call, cowboy; we do this easy or we do it hard." Image: Sultan Ahmed Mosque in Instanbul, Turkey.