Turkish War on Twitter

The country’s Prime Minister’s “war on Twitter” started as a plan to stop citizens talking about a government corruption scandal that was proving embarrassing.

The Prime Minister pledged to “wipe out Twitter” and ordered Turkish Internet service providers to block the microblogging service, redirecting requests to a government webpage. Nevertheless, this measure was quickly circumvented by Twitter users via alternative DNS servers.

The Turkish government is not going to give up and has ordered Internet service providers to block traffic to the IP addresses assigned to Twitter. Indeed, such a move essentially erases the social networking website from the Internet within the country.

As a result, Twitter is now only available to people who have access to SMS messaging, a foreign VPN or Web proxy service, or the Tor anonymizing network. It means that despite the best efforts of the government, Twitter is still open to anyone who still wants it. Worse still, the social media campaign against the Prime Minister is rapidly growing with ordinary Turks being unhappy with his censorship antics.

Right after being banned, Twitter usage in Turkey increased 138%, so rather than fewer reading about the Prime Minister’s corruption scandal, more people are. Now the government has ordered his IT experts to start attacking DNS providers in attempt to keep Turks inside their own restricted Internet.

According to other reports, the devices configured to use Google’s DNS service or other DNS providers outside Turkey are being hijacked to a local DNS server by the Wi-Fi network right at Istanbul’s airport. As you can understand, business is booming for VPN services and Tor anonymizing network in the country right now. Online agencies are providing a list of Tor gateways for local users, and Tor network metrics have seen a huge spike in users directly connecting to the Tor network over the past few days: the statistics showed their number grew from 25,000 users to 35,000 in a week.

Besides, downloads of VPN software have also increased, with VPN applications for both Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android becoming the most downloaded applications from their respective app stores in the country. It seems that Twitter is winning this battle.

erdoğan's followers don't believe in facts, proofs, evidences, documents etc.
they all think that recordings are fake -or made by foreign countries which don't want us to get bigger.
i mean, are there any other pm who makes calls with his son about getting rid of million dollars?