Internet Censorship Madness and why Turkey Blocks Youtube and Farmville

When Farmville got blocked was when it got really silly.. Under directions of the newly formed Telecommunications Communication Presidency (TIB), the Turkish ISPs blocked all access to this application from within Turkey. Of course they were not overly concerned with blocking access to the virtual farms, it was more to do with the Farmvilles creators Zynga..

The company Zynga were deemed unacceptable because they produced some gambling and poker applications.

As it stands there are now well over 6000 web sites, being blocked in Turkey for a variety of reasons including pornography, piracy, religion and moral reasons.. In fact only the other month, two social networking communities were blockec as they catered for gay and lesbian users.. Certain videos of Kemal Ataturk, led to Youtube being blocked by Turkey as well..

It is in my opinion why the internet should never be censored, by all means arrest and close down criminals and plainly illegal content, but when a single organisation decides to control what a whole nation can see online it surely cannot be democratic.

Across the world wide web, governments are seeking control of what we do online.. All across the Internet, more and more governments are either controlling or monitoring what we do online.

When you seek to control a population, social networking makes it much harder.. After all these places are specifically designed to share thoughts, experiences and opinions – but what happens when the particular state decides it doesn’t like that specific opinion?

I’m certain Kemal Ataturk, would have been very upset with what the TIB are up to now.. there’s a growing intolerance being shown in many different areas by the Turkish government inparticular towards what people see or do, thank goodness there are a myriad ways around this censorship!

If you’re interested you can read more about Internet filtering here. Or to learn about staying anonymous here.