Late in the evening on March 20th Turkish twitter users were met with an unfortunate reality. The country’s access to the popular social media site had been blocked. This followed the declaration of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan that the government had a court order allowing for the shutdown. A similar ban was placed on YouTube on March 27, three days before the country’s elections. While both restrictions have been ruled unconstitutional by the country’s court system, only Twitter has been reinstated. Between the restrictions and public rhetoric, Erdoğan’s government has sent a clear message. The Turkish government has gone to war with social media.
In waging this war the Erdoğan government has placed Turkey in company that no country should relish. According to a recent piece by Mother Jones, countries that ban or significantly restrict Facebook, YouTube and/or Twitter reads like a laundry list of despotism. They include Iran, China, Pakistan, Eritrea, North Korea and Vietnam. Additionally, Russia’s Duma in the past few days sent an anti-terrorism bill to Vladimir Putin’s desk that could amount to a de facto ban on several such social media sites. The bill would require all foreign technology companies house all data from Russian users on Russian soil to allow authorities to “legally acquire and inspect data at will,” a prospect that many will find repugnant.
Its inclusion on this list follows a troubling trend for Turkey. The country, by many accounts, is sliding towards personality-driven authoritarianism, with Erdoğan attempting to subvert checks and balances, control the judiciary and remain in power past (party imposed) term limits. The country is also the world’s leading jailer of journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Despite these autocratic bona fides, Turkey remains the freest of the countries that severely restricts social media. According to Freedom House, a Washington-based non-profit that attempts to judge comparative levels of freedom throughout the world, Turkey and Pakistan are the only countries that are “partly free” (Pakistan averages a 4.5 on the organization’s scale, where 7 is the most tyrannical, while Turkey averages a 3.5) while the rest of the list is resoundingly “not free.” Even worse, Eritrea and North Korea find themselves on the NGO’s “Worst of the Worst” rights violators list.
The level of oppression within particular countries that ban social media sites is important when examining policy solutions. More often than not the restricted access is part of a wider problem, rather than a disdain for the sites themselves. While Eritrea and North Korea are among the most censored countries in the world and there exists a wide ranging focus on preventing the dissemination of information, most of the anti-social-media policies are in response to particular events.
China’s attempt to block access to social media stemmed largely from unrest amongst the Uighur population in the Xinjiang province in 2009. Pakistan blocked YouTube due to the controversial film “Innocence of Muslims,” which many (including Pakistan’s government) regard as blasphemous to Muslims. Some believe this ban will be lifted after an American Court ruled that YouTube must take down the film earlier this year, but progress is yet to be seen. Iran’s restriction on access to social media was driven by the 2009 uprising following the fundamentally flawed re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. While the ban remains, Iran’s new President Hassan Rouhani, Foreign Minister Javad Zarif and a number of other high ranking ministers are avid tweeters and have called for an end to the ban, though Rouhani admits that his tweets are written by “friends.”
Turkey, for its part, blocked access to Twitter and YouTube due to recent events as well. A number of YouTube videos portrayed telephone calls allegedly showing graft amongst Erdoğan’s AK Party’s senior officials. This was, however, not the first time that YouTube has been restricted in Turkey, as it has been shut down several times in the last decade. Twitter played a prominent role in last year’s Gezi Park protests, which led Erdoğan to call the microblogging site “trouble.” In hindsight, this may have been the beginning of trouble for Twitter in Turkey.
In addition to delving into the root cause of social media restriction in countries, it is important to note that many such bans have had, at best, mixed success. When Turkey instituted its ban a number of websites and news outlets went on the offensive, training Turks to work around the ban. This included the ability to tweet via text message, changing the domain name settings (DNS) on a device to conceal geographic location and the use of a virtual private network (VPN), also obscuring the geographic location of a would-be tweeter. Similar tactics are used throughout the social media restricting world.
At a time when foreign aid budgets are being slashed in throughout western capitals, it is important to note the ease with which such bans can be subverted. It is also important to understand that in most despotic regimes, the times when social media is attacked are the times where it is most important. Whether Facebook, Twitter or a local equivalent is the avenue that drives an uprising, that uprising is the time when authoritarian governments are most likely to attempt to attack.
If the United States and the rest of the West are to be the world’s true guardians of freedom of expression, democracy and human rights, these would be the times to further aid with training, applications and “workarounds” that allow access to social media even as governments attempt to restrict the free flow of information. While there has been much success subverting such bans, authoritarian governments will undoubtedly catch up and new routes must be found. The internet, social media and the free flow of information have the potential to change the world. Dictators and tyrants want to stand in the way. The West can, and must, make sure they cannot.
