Under the Turkish court ruling, access to the social media sites including YouTube, Twitter and Facebook was temporarily banned over the publication of images showing a prosecutor kidnapped by far-left militants in the capital of the country.

Mehmet Selim Kiraz was killed when security forces stormed the office in the Istanbul courthouse where far-left militants had taken him hostage. They published a picture of Kiraz held at gunpoint on social media. So, the social media ban arrived after a demand to block 166 websites that posted those pictures, including direct links to Turkish newspapers, 7 of which now face a criminal investigation for publishing the photo of Kiraz.

It became known that ban on Facebook was lifted after the company quickly complied with the court ruling. Then the ban on Twitter was also lifted when it removed the controversial images. As for the ban on YouTube, it remained, with the court ordering Google to also remove material on this story to avoid blockage. Turkish authorities confirmed that the procedure would continue and that all ISPs would be ordered to implement the ban rapidly.

It should be mentioned that once the Twitter ban came into effect, the hashtag #TwitterisblockedinTurkey became the top trending term globally. Of course, the local users quickly found a way to circumvent the ban – some of them actually learned that Twitter is blocked from… Twitter.

You may remember that Turkey has blocked social media before – in the runup to local elections a year ago, the country also blocked access to both Twitter and YouTube for publishing audio recordings alleging corruption in the country’s government.

Turkish Internet users learned the way to bypass the ban by heart now: for example, they use virtual private networks that allow to connect to the web undetected. Another way is to change the domain name settings to conceal the geolocation.

As usual, the ban caused widespread outrage all over the world. In response, a presidential spokesman defended the ban, saying that the ruling was passed only because some media outlets “spread terrorist propaganda” by publishing the controversial pictures. This is why the prosecutor’s office demanded that this image not be used anywhere on the Internet.