Talking Turkey: bloggers ban themselves in protest over banned blogs

By Davey Winder
Monday, 18 August 2008 17:06

Networking

More than 200 bloggers in Turkey have taken the decision to ban their own blogs in protest at the Turkish government which has already banned hundreds of websites for insulting either the government or Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the Turkish Republic.

YouTube knows how easy it is to get yourself banned in Turkey, it felt the full force of the Turkish government dislike for criticism of any kind when a video suggesting that revolutionary hero Ataturk was gay appeared.

Of course, while YouTube may well be the biggest name to get banned (on numerous occasions) for talking Turkey, it is far from being alone. The regime has issued bans on hundreds of websites ranging from the likes of Slide.com to assorted Wordpress blogs.

Indeed, bloggers seem to be relatively high on the hit list as far as the Turkish authorities are concerned. Which is probably why they have decided to act now.

However, the manner in which they are protesting about censorship is unusual to say the least: Turkish bloggers are censoring themselves.

Now while you may think that this just means waving a white flag and doing what the Turkish government wants, the bloggers would argue it is far from that. For a few days this week they are replacing their entire blogs with a single page stating:

Bu siteye erisim kendi karariyla engellenmistir

I understand that this translates into something along the lines of:

“This site is banned due to court decision”

Which is kind of cool, if not totally accurate as the 200 blogs in question have not (yet) been banned by any court. But what exactly are the bloggers protesting against here? The answer, it would appear, is Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code.

What is Article 301, how does it impact upon the Internet, and what are bloggers doing about it? Find out on page 2...

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