Kamil Pasha

I just tried to access a charming safari video on YouTube that was mentioned in The New York Times (”Battle at Kruger“), but discovered that instead of YouTube, the site brought up the by now familiar red sign announcing that the site has been banned by a Turkish court order. Not a particular video, but the entire site. Checking around the (rest of) the web, I learned that the ban, like previous bans, was in response to a video that the court believed insulted Turkishness, specifically Ataturk.

So YouTube is now banned in Turkey, where viewers would have been appalled anyway and would probably never have looked at the offending video. BUT Turkey can’t ban YouTube on the rest of the planet, and now the court can be sure that EVERYONE ELSE will be watching that offending video! It also puts Turkey’s name in the same sentence as China and Iran.

I attach below comments from Techdirt, a technology blog, about Turkey’s YouTube ban. It’s instructive also to read the comments, which are not flattering to Turkey, but also make it clear that people (including some Turkish respondents) don’t understand where the ban is coming from. YouTube wasn’t banned by Islamists, but by nationalist secularists.

A quote from the blog:

It would appear that Turkish officials don’t seem to understand quite how the internet works these days — despite having received quite a few lessons already. After all, this is the country that has banned YouTube for a sophomoric video making fun of the country’s founder. It’s the type of silly video no one would pay attention to… until Turkey decided to block access to all of YouTube because of it. Then, of course, this silly little video that no one cared about was seen everywhere. Eventually Turkey lifted the ban, but having learned nothing put the ban back in place not just once, but two more times. Each time, it provided much more attention to the silly pointless videos. Apparently, that message has not gotten through to Turkish authorities who have now banned the multimedia hosting site Slide as well. Again, they didn’t bother to inform Slide or even ask the company to take down the offending content. They just banned the entire site over some content that very few people had probably seen.

For the full Techdirt.com blog commentary and comments, click here.

Tags: Culture, Nationalism, Rights //