In March 2014, two Turkish academics — Kerem Altiparmak and Yaman Akdeniz — led the legal fight at the Constitutional Court that secured the lifting of Ankara’s ban on Twitter. Less than a year on, the pair’s quest against Internet censorship has taken a new turn. They are now mulling legal action against Twitter itself, in the United States, as the company draws mounting criticism for collaborating with Ankara’s censorship machine.
Twitter’s own statistics illustrate how its compliance with Turkish restrictions has increased at a time when Ankara faces growing international condemnation for gagging free speech. According to the company’s transparency report for the second half of 2014, released Feb. 9, Turkey topped the list of countries seeking content removal, sending Twitter a total of 477 court rulings and government agency requests, an increase of more than 150% from the first half of the year and five times more than the runner-up, Russia. Twitter withheld content in relation to 50% of Turkish demands, up from 30% in the first half of 2014 and 0% in 2013. Overall, 62 of the 85 accounts and 1,820 of the 1,982 tweets Twitter withheld were from Turkey.
For free speech activists, Twitter’s growing compliance is a cause for serious alarm. Social media and Twitter in particular are among the few public realms in Turkey today where the government has failed to suppress criticism and information exposing dirty linen — from graft and in-house feuds to secret arms shipments to Syria. The onslaught on the Internet has intensified since December 2013, when a massive corruption investigation rattled the ruling party ahead of local polls. Twitter became a channel for scathing leaks from the probe, and ended up being banned for two weeks.
On Jan. 20, Altiparmak and Akdeniz, both scholars of the law, sent a legal notice to Twitter, urging the company to stop its blocking practices, which, they said, had become a means of stifling free speech in Turkey. Among other arguments, they stressed that “Twitter carries the characteristics of a public forum protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and there is no alternative platform to it in Turkey.” If Twitter fails to change its attitude, “we will take all possible forms of legal action in both Turkey and the United States,” they warned.
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