ANKARA, Turkey — Turkey’s leading press organization and two experts in Internet law took legal action Monday to try to overturn a government ban on Twitter, even as the government intensified its efforts to block access to the social media site.
The organization, the Turkish Journalists’ Association, which represents 3,300 journalists, filed a complaint in a local Ankara court, arguing that the ban violated freedom of information protected by the Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights. Using a similar argument to challenge the ban’s legality, two lawyers specializing in Internet regulation filed a case at the Constitutional Court of Turkey, which has the authority to revoke the ban.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan moved to ban Twitter on Thursday after a series of leaks on social media helped fuel a corruption scandal ensnaring his government. The scandal is one of the biggest challenges to Mr. Erdogan’s authority since he came to power 11 years ago.
Despite an international outcry over the ban, the government has remained undeterred, and over the weekend, The Hurriyet Daily News, a Turkish newspaper, reported that the government had moved to make it more difficult for Twitter users to try to circumvent the ban. Thousands of users have been altering the Domain Name System settings on their devices to allow them to use Twitter.
The United States has loudly criticized the ban. On Friday, Douglas Frantz, the assistant secretary of public affairs at the State Department, equated it to “21st-century book burning.”
Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in a Twitter message posted on Sunday, voiced similar concerns. “The freedom to speak out and to connect is a fundamental right,” she wrote. “The people of Turkey deserve that right restored.”