News

Blogger.com banned in Turkey

Google groups, porn sites, slide.com, wordpress, YouTube… Blogger.com is the latest addition to this list of banned web sites in Turkey.
After the passing of the new law, web sites in Turkey can be banned without a warning for several reasons:

• Obscenity: This of course leads to a whole lot of questions like “How to define obscenity”
• Promoting drug use
• Provoking suicide: Another open-to-interpretation clause. Would a movie about a suicidal teenager be promoting suicide?
• Sexuel abuse of children
• Insult to Turkishness and Ataturk
• Prostitution
• Gambling
• Providing material harmful to public health

Although the law, passed seemingly to fight child porn, when the statistics are examined, the main reason of the banning of web sites, seems to be obscenity, which is 3 times more than sites shut down for child molestation.
Besides these clauses, personal insult can lead to the banning of the web site as it happenende with Adnan Oktar vs. Richar Dawkins in which Adnan Oktar, a religious writer, claimed Richard Dawkins web site was insulting his book. Therefore. The web site of a well known scientist was shut down to Turkish users with a singfle click. Adnan Oktar seems to be the reason of many other web site bannings lately, including the web site of one of the biggest newspaper’s in Turkey (Vatan) and atheist forum.