Committee to Protect Journalists

New York, March 21, 2014–Turkey banned access to the social media platform Twitter on Friday, hours after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan threatened in a public speech to shut it down, according to news reports. The move comes just ahead of March 30 elections and follows Erdoğan’s threats to ban Facebook and YouTube.

“Prime Minister Erdoğan can keep stepping up his attacks on social media, but they only serve to show that he is afraid of the message and desperate to shoot the messenger,” CPJ Europe and Central Asia Program Coordinator Nina Ognianova said. “We call on Turkish authorities to restore access to Twitter and to substantiate their claims to democracy by allowing all information to flow freely.”

At a campaign rally on Thursday in the western city of Bursa, Erdoğan claimed that a court order justified banning Twitter, according to press reports. The Turkish telecommunications regulator BTK said today that Internet service providers had been ordered to block access to Twitter after several users filed legal complaints in early March about violation of their privacy on the social networking site. BTK said the measure was intended to prevent the possible “victimization of citizens.”

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