When You Have A Hammer, Everything Looks Like A Nail
On Turkish web censorship, a Financial Times article from August 22:
A law passed in 2007 gave judges the power to ban websites for inciting suicide, drug use, paedophilia, immorality, illegal prostitution or insulting Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the architect of modern Turkey.
Judges have used the power to its fullest, temporarily closing popular websites including Wordpress, the blogging platform, Alibaba.com, a trading site, Slide.com, the photo sharing site, and Geocites, the webhosting service.
YouTube, the Google-owned online video-sharing site, has fallen foul of the censors several times and has been off-limits to users in Turkey since May. It has been alarmed at authorities’ attempts to make contentious content inaccessible not only to viewers in Turkey but around the world…
Turkey’s young society – more than three-quarters of the 72m population is under 30 – has embraced the internet, flooding social networking and file-sharing sites and making Turkish one of the leading languages online. Turks make up the fourth biggest national community.
…Baris Karadogan, a Turkish venture capitalist in Silicon Valley [said] “Closing sites like YouTube is ridiculous. But when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail. The Turkish government will learn that closing down sites will solve nothing.” (click here)
Take a look at this (click; in Turkish).
There are nails to be sure, but hammers are busy doing needlework. There’s gotta be some English expression for this that I don’t know.
Thanks for the link, though FT has the quote wrong.
It should be
“When ALL you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”
Tesekkurler
BK
Nihat, that free speech case is very interesting. I’m not sure that speech would’t be considered protected speech in the US if the Brandenburg test were to be applied.
If it goes there, the ECHR will probably not act as principled as the SCOTUS did in 1969 and it might be a good opportunity for the difference in approaches and guidelines to emerge.