A disclaimer: This article will in no way disparage Turkey, “Turkishness,” or the Eurasian country’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. It turns out that doing that sort of thing can get you banned in Turkey, which is what YouTube discovered for itself on Wednesday.
As reported by the Times Online, it seems that some Greek and Turkish users had been trading insults through the site when the issue of homosexuality came up. Now “[a] court in Istanbul has issued an order denying access to . . . YouTube. The state owned Turk Telecom implemented the ban today . . . .”
“Some of the smaller private internet providers have not yet implemented the ban,” the article reveals, but the incident still represents something of a problem for YouTube. It may also become an issue for Turkey, as the European Union – which it is trying to join -frowns upon this sort of behavior. YouTube did, after all, agree to remove the videos in question.
Another sticking point in relations between Turkey and the EU is the fact that “[t]he country’s most famous author, Orhan Pamuk, faced up to three years in jail after being charged with ‘insulting Turkishness’ after talking to a Swiss newspaper about Turkey’s human rights record.” Luckily for Pamuk, “The case was dropped in January after international condemnation.”
Perhaps Turkey’s ban on YouTube will also be abandoned – the site did, after all, get spared some sort of permanent block in Brazil following a similar dispute there.
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