Turkish citizens defy Twitter ban to attack prime minister

Hours after Turkey’s increasingly jumpy government moved to block access to Twitter, Turkish citizens struck back – on the social media network itself.

Some circulated a photoshopped picture of Recep Tayyip Erdogan., prime minister, sinking his teeth into the cartoonish blue bird that serves as the network’s mascot. They were far from alone: the number of tweets sent after the midnight ban increased by about 140 per cent over normal levels, according to data provided by analytics company Brandwatch.

Twitter itself sent out mobile numbers that allowed Turkish consumers to keep using its service. In a tweet from its policy team, the company said: “We stand with our users in Turkey who rely on Twitter as a vital communications platform. We hope to have full access returned soon.”

In another technical fix against the ban, Turkish downloads of Hotspot Shield, the world’s most popular virtual private network service, increased to 270,000 on Friday – from a daily average of 7,000.

The Turkish users’ defiance and the sheer scale of their activity suggest no immediate end to the battering Mr Erdogan has suffered in cyberspace.

Seeking to silence allegations of corruption against him and his government in the run-up to local elections on March 30, he has removed some 7,000 policemen from their posts and boosted Ankara’s powers over judges and prosecutors.

But the internet has proved much harder to handle. A formal corruption investigation has stalled, Twitter and YouTube have been used to circulate apparently incriminating voice recordings of Mr Erdogan and his circle – including some he says are fake, but others he has acknowledged as authentic.

Yet more explosive leaks are expected ahead of this month’s elections – according to one rumour, more revelations will come on March 25. But if Turkey’s Twitter ban was intended to thwart the dissemination of such allegations, it has backfired spectacularly.

“Erdogan is constantly on the run now, I don’t think he has time to think,” said Soli Ozel at Kadir Has university in Istanbul. “He is trying to keep the scandal as muted as possible at all costs, but he can’t control the technology. Instead he is fuelling the fire of suspicion and making everyone anticipate what, if anything will come out on the 25th.”

Mr Erdogan took aim at Twitter on Thursday, saying he would “root out” the microblogging service for national security reasons. But he failed to account for his country’s predilection for social networks – a response, many say, to a cowed local media – which means that Twitter has greater penetration among Turkish internet users than in any other country in the world.

In a sign of the political difficulty faced by the ban, even President Abdullah Gul, who recently signed a bill increasing government control over the internet, took to Twitter to announce his own opposition to the measure. (One fellow Turkish user immediately asked him what settings he was using to access the network.)

Before long the European Commission, the Council of Europe, the UK government, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and many other non-governmental and international organisations had all sent their own tweets deploring what they depicted as an attack on free speech.

In the US, the White House said it was “deeply concerned that the Turkish government has blocked its citizens’ access to basic communication tools”. In a statement it said: “We oppose this restriction on the Turkish people’s access to information, which undermines their ability to exercise freedoms of expression and association and runs contrary to the principles of open governance that are critical to democratic governance and the universal rights that the US stands for around the world.”

Celebrities such as Russell Crowe, Richard Branson, Mia Farrow and Elijah Wood piled in.

The Turkish bar association filed a criminal complaint against the ban, which it said was illegal and disproportionate. As sporadic Twitter service returned in parts of the country, a degree of mystery surrounded who had formally imposed the measure, supposedly in response to court complaints about invasion of privacy.

The government says the ban was imposed because Twitter had failed to respect such court complaints; a lawyer for Twitter was in Ankara for meetings on Friday afternoon.

“These steps are very crucial for the Turkish legal system,” said Selin Erciyas, at Mehmet Gun & Partners, an Istanbul law firm. “We will see if there is a true objective legal system or whether it is just Erdogan that decides things in court.”

Additional reporting by Robert Cookson and Hannah Kuchler

Twitter reaction