Late last night, access to Twitter was restricted in Turkey after its prime minister Recap Tayyip Erdoğan threatened to ‘root out’ the social media network because of leaked information, including wiretapped recordings, went viral and threatened to tarnish the government’s reputation ahead of local elections. But it turns out that it’s not so easy to block access to parts of the internet in 2014, because savvy Twitter users are getting round the block in their droves. In fact, there’s been no real drop off in tweets at all from the region – which is a pretty amazing middle finger to the government and a victory for free speech isn’t it?
According to TwitTurk, which records the statistics of Turkish Twitter users, over half a million tweets were posted in only 10 hours, which shows no significant drop from the average 1.8 million daily tweets in that region. On top of that, the hashtags #TwitterisblockedinTurkey and #TurkeyBlockedTwitter became trending topics worldwide only a few hours after the Prime Minister swore to ‘root out’ unfavourable tweets about the government on social media.
People in Turkey are managing to get on Twitter by using an alternate DNS service, the number of which is being posted everywhere - from being graffitied on public spaces to shared on social media sites.
Ironically, if the Prime Minister had just left alone, the government’s shortcomings probably wouldn’t have gone viral, which is a good lesson in not messing around with internet natives. Bad luck Recap Tayyip Erdoğan.
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophiecullinane
Picture: Getty
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.