Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan says that social networks are facilitating the spread of wiretapped recordings that have been politically damaging. The YouTube block reportedly came about after a video surfaced of government officials discussing the possibility of going to war with Syria. The government officially banned Twitter after the network refused to take down an account accusing a former minister of corruption. Twitter is challenging the ban and a Turkish court overturned it on Wednesday, but it’s not yet clear how an appeal might play out.
Turkey is hardly the first
country to crack down on social unrest by going after social networks. There
are at least six other countries currently blocking Facebook, YouTube, or
Twitter in some capacity (see map below), and many more have instituted temporary
blocks over the last couple of years. Here’s everything you need to know:
China: China blocked Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube in 2009. The Twitter and Facebook bans took place after a peaceful protest by Uighurs, China’s Muslim ethnic minority, broke into deadly riots in Xinjiang. In September 2013, the government decided to stop censoring foreign websites in the Shanghai Free Trade Zone, a 17-square-mile area in mainland China, but these social networks are still largely blocked nationwide.
Iran: Iran has blocked Facebook,
Twitter, and YouTube on and off (usually off) since
they were banned in 2009 following
Iran’s contentious presidential election.
Vietnam: Over the last couple of years,
there have been widespread reports of Facebook being blocked in
Vietnam. The block is fairly easy to bypass, and many Vietnamese citizens use
the social network. However, in September 2013, Vietnam passed a law prohibiting
citizens from posting anti-government content on the social network. Facebook
did not comment on access in Vietnam.
Pakistan: In September 2012,
Pakistan blocked YouTube
after the site reportedly refused to take down an anti-Islam video that sparked
protests in the country. The block has continued through March 2014,
according to Google.
North Korea: Internet access is highly
restricted in North Korea.
Eritrea: According to Reporters Without Borders, in 2011, two of
the country’s major internet service providers blocked YouTube. Freedom House, a US
watchdog that conducts research on political freedom, said the site was blocked
in its 2013 report and notes, “The government requires all internet service
providers to use state-controlled internet infrastructure.” Eritrea is
routinely listed as one of the most censored countries in the world. Google
does not include Eritrea
on its list of countries in its
transparency report that currently block YouTube, but notes
that the list “is not comprehensive” and may not include partial blocks.
This data was compiled with help
from Google’s transparency report, Twitter,
and the Open Net Initiative,
a partnership between the University of Toronto, Harvard, and
the SecDev Group in Ottawa. It doesn’t take into account countries where
only certain pages or videos may be censored. The United Arab Emirates, for
example, jailed an American citizen last
year for posting a comedic video to YouTube—but it doesn’t block the entire network, so
it’s not on the map. Additionally, Google and Twitter don’t
list their services as being blocked in Cuba, but social networks there are
difficult to access, in part due to cost barriers.
Outside of these current
blocks, many governments have banned social-media networks in the past, during
periods of unrest. Here’s a brief history of notable incidents:
Since 2009, Google has counted
16 disruptions to YouTube in 11 regions, often in the wake of protests. In
March 2009, Bangladesh blocked YouTube
for four days after someone posted a video of a meeting between army officers
and the Prime Minister that revealed unrest in the military. Bangladesh blocked
the network again for an extended period between 2012 and 2013over an anti-Islam video. Libya blocked YouTube (and
other social networks) for 574 days between 2010 and 2011, after the site
hosted videos depicting families of prisoners killed in Abu Salim prison
demonstrating in Benghazi, according to Human Rights Watch. Syria blocked YouTube (as well as Facebook) for
about three years, lifting the ban in February 2011. Tajikistan has
blocked YouTube more than once, most recently in 2013, over a video of the president dancing. Afghanistan
blocked YouTube for 113 days between September 2012 and January 2013, after
fears that an anti-Islam film on the site would spark further riots. Here’s
how Google depicts the Afghanistan ban:
Twitter,
which was used as a tool to organize protests during the Arab Spring, was
shut down partially or completely by several governments in the region in 2011,
including Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Cameroon, and Malawi, according to
the Open Net Initiative. Belarus has also blocked major social
networks, including Twitter, in 2011 to quell anti-government
protests. That same year, when a series of riots swept the United Kingdom,
Prime Minister David Cameron threatened to ban people from using
social-networking sites, including Twitter and Facebook, although he didn’t go
through with it. Targeting specific users or pages is more common than complete
bans on Twitter—South Korea, for example, blocked access to North
Korea’s official Twitter account in 2010 on the basis that it contained
“illegal information.” When it’s clear that a certain Tweet or user is only
being blocked in a select country, Twitter flags it as “Country Withheld Content.”
Facebook was
also temporarily blocked by several countries during the Arab Spring.
In 2010, Pakistan temporarily blocked Facebook after it hosted a
competition called, “Everybody Draw Mohammad Day,” which collected about 200
entries. Myanmar has sporadically blocked
Facebook; China claims the ban was lifted there in
2013. There have also been instances where governments have blocked
fake individual pages pretending to belong to world leaders. In 2008,
Morocco went so far as to arrest a man for creating a profile posing
as Prince Moulay Rachid. So far, Turkey has not yet chosen to censor Facebook,
but that might simply be because it’s not on the prime minister’s radar. “What
is this thing called Twitter, anyway?” Erdogan said Tuesday on NTV, a
privately owned Turkish news channel. “It is a company, involved in
communication, social media, etc.” -
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