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Wednesday, March 7, 2007

YouTube Reportedly Blocked in Turkey

Reader Mert Maviş sends in the following alert (HTML’ified):

I wanted to inform you about the bad news from Turkey. YouTube will be censored in Turkey (...) as a result of the disagreeable videos about Atatürk (the founder of Turkey).

You can find full stroy from here.

I’m very sorry that my country will cause such a bad reputation by these censorships, but we are happy to fight against them. I’m running a blog network (the largest and the only one) in Turkey. We are starting a campaign and going to write against these censorships in our blogs until they correct this huge mistake. (...)

You can find some information about us from here.

I asked Mert what he sees when he enters YouTube.com. Mert sent above screenshot, which reads:

Bu siteye erişim mahkeme karariyla engellenmiştir !... (...)

Access to www.youtube.com site has been suspended in accordance with decision no: 2007/ 384 dated 06.03.2007 of Istanbul First Criminial Peace Court.

Is everyone else from Turkey seeing this too? I’ll ask Google/ YouTube for further confirmation, in the meantime.

[Thanks Mert!]

Update: A YouTube spokesperson tells me:

We are disappointed that YouTube has been blocked in Turkey. The Internet is an international phenomenon and while technology can bring great opportunity and access to information globally, it can also present new and unique cultural challenges. We respect the authorities in Turkey and are committed to working with them to resolve this. We should note, however, that the video in question is no longer on the site.

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