U.S. citizens take note – people can call you un-American, but at least they can’t have you jailed for it. Turkey’s peculiar in that respect; any insult to their founder or ‘Turkishness’ in general, and you might see court and jailtime. Now the latest victim of Turkey’s zealous defenders of all things Turkish is Slide Inc, the company behind many a popular Facebook app.

AP reported the Turkish government’s blocking access to Slide Inc, and by default a lot of Facebook apps. This was due to a local court ruling that the site allowed users to post photos and stories insulting the Turkish republic’s founder, Kemal Ataturk. Somewhat reminiscent of Pakistan’s misguided blocking of YouTube, huh?

Not that Slide should feel alone in Turkey’s ‘persecution’. MySpace, Blogger, Facebook, YouTube – all these services have seen countries like China, Thailand, the UAE and everyone’s favourite, Pakistan, block access to their services.

Turkish law itself is a funny thing. Authors, academics and politicians have all suffered jail and censure when accused of insulting “Turkishness”, state institutions and Turkey’s founding father. John Duncan, Slide’s general counsel, says the order to Turkish Telecom to block Slide Web sites was likely handed down on January 24 by a court in Civril. Civril is about 185 miles southwest of the Turkish capital, Ankara.

Slide officials say they have yet to receive formal notice of the action against them, nor have they been able to identify the supposed offending material. Turkish Telecom, though, had little choice but to comply with the court order. The ban would likely affect hundreds of thousands of the country’s users, with at least 2.85 million users in total for Turkey.

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 5:18 am under Uncategorized.

Read more entries by Erna Mahyuni.
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