WordPress Blocked in Turkey

// August 18th, 2007 // politics

Time to leave Turkey, as the Turkish state forcefully blocked my website robokow.net as well as all other websites using the blogging-services of wordpress.com.

‘Access to this site has been suspended in accordance with decision no: 2007/195 of T.C. Fatih 2.Civil Court of First Instance’, is the message that now appears instead of the frontpage of WordPress.

Turkey is famous for restricting public speech. Here it is a crime to insult “Turkishness” and citizens who do so are persecuted according to Article 301. Likely, one blog that is using WordPress was found guilty of this and hence the whole platform has been blocked.

Earlier this year the same happened to You Tube. Only after You Tube removed the particular video, the website was unblocked again. If this is the case I really hope WordPress will not follow the example of YouTube. This Turkish law is very unjust and these type of actions ought not to be tolerated.

I cannot see my own website, though I am still able to post on it through Flickr, the website that hosts my photos.

No Responses to “WordPress Blocked in Turkey”

  1. veromilla says:

    So much for freedom of expression… is this really the idea of a country moving forward? how can a person that is proud of being Turkish be ever offended… how does any person proud of being whoever/whatever they are can ever be offended? Bollocks! Censorship is ignorance, it is blindness, it is insecurity, unawareness, lack of knowledge it is… it is… restrictive, it is oppression, limitation in every way…

  2. Sirkka says:

    I am very sorry to hear this. Good luck with searching your next destination.

  3. Jasper says:

    this sounds horrible. but do you wanne leave the country because this happened?
    i guess you knew bevor that turkey doesn´t have he same free expression standards as the netherlands
    for example. well, if you don´t wanne live there anymore come back to BCN. I´ll be there.

  4. [...] Freund Robin erlebt grad am eigenen Leib Blog die Folgen der [...]

  5. Sardinia76 says:

    I’m sorry to hear that you are leaving Turkey so early, as you panned already to stay for quite some time there…..
    but it’s a good reason to leave, never without FREEDOM….move on, ciao

  6. [...] um es mit den Worten von Robin zu sagen: heute ist meine [...]

  7. There is more than free speech involved here. A view on the matter from one of the “native” victims: “WordPress banned in Turkey: a case of throwing the baby with the bath-water

  8. sunshineforlife says:

    That sounds bad but hopefully you will get back the freedom using wordpress the soonest.

    Happy travelling “again”

  9. robino says:

    In the past week it became clearer why wordpress is blocked (some guy didn’t like what others wrote about him and somehow he got the judge to block all wordpress websites), and also ways how to bypass the block.

    http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/08/how-to-read-wordpresscom-blogs-in.html
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harun_Yahya#Controversy

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