Twitter, YouTube, Facebook Censored Despite Constitutional Court Ruling

Istanbul 1^st Peace Court blocked 166 websites including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube on the grounds that they have published the photos of Mehmet Selim Kiraz during Istanbul Courthouse hostage crisis on March 31. 

According to Hürriyet newspaper, the ban was issues even though its extend of bans don’t include the URLs of twitter.com, facebook.com and youtube.com. The aforementioned blanker ban cited in the Article 3 of the court order. 

Approximately an hour after the ban, Facebook has been unblocked according to Tayfun Acarer from Information Technologies Authorities (BTK) as it compiled with removal of requested content. 

Istanbul Bilgi University Law Faculty Professor Yaman Akdeniz told bianet that the ban has disregarded the previous rulings on Turkey’s Constitutional Court.

“With one single judge’s decision, an entire is being banned here,” he continued, “These are not rulings that should be taken not seriously. They are telling Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to meet Turkey’s demands”. 

Previously, Twitter has been censored on 21 March 2014 - a ban uplifted by the Constitutional Court a month later due to right violations. YouTube, in addition, has been censored several times and Constitutional Court has ruled on right violations as well.

On the other hand, #twitterisblockedinturkey became one of the top tweet trends worldwide. (EA/BM)

* Click here to read the article in Turkish.