After declaring on Thursday that he would “wipe out Twitter,” Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan ordered Turkey’s Internet service providers to start blocking the social media platform. The move came after a leaked recording, allegedly of Erdoğan in phone conversations with his son, was posted to YouTube and promoted widely by Twitter users.
Unlike some recent Internet crackdowns, however, the Turkish Twitter blockade is easily avoided. Twitter has posted instructions for Turkish users on how to post using SMS, and there are a number of simple steps that smartphone and computer users can take to continue to access the service despite the “block.”
Ironically, the move by Erdoğan's government may simply make it harder for Turkey to censor social media in the future, and it may accelerate the spread of the information he’s trying to control: audio of efforts to hide evidence in an ongoing corruption investigation. It’s the Streisand effect on a national scale.
Ragequit
Twitter was blocked by a decree from Turkey’s telecommunications ministry based on a court “protection measure” issued on March 2, 2014. But the block wasn’t put into effect until after a campaign speech by Erdoğan yesterday in which he declared, “Twitter, schmitter! We will wipe out Twitter. I don’t care what the international community says.”
Erdoğan had previously threatened to block all social media in Turkey as the country’s March 30 elections approach. The prime minister has railed against social media as “the worst menace to society”—largely because of the use of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube during last year’s Gezi Park protests to spread information and coordinate actions.
But the ham-fisted effort to block Twitter has been easy for most Turks to sidestep, at least so far. Rather than using some wide-ranging packet-filtering technology to block traffic specifically bound for the Twitter service, the Turkish government has ordered ISPs to use a Domain Name Service change to redirect Twitter requests to a government webpage.
Sidestepping the man
The DNS redirect only works if people continue to use their ISP’s DNS servers, however. All that any computer user in Turkey needs to do to bypass those servers is to point their network settings at a public DNS service outside of Turkey, such as the one offered by Google.
There are readily available methods that will work in case the government begins using packet-filtering firewalls to block Twitter completely as well. And they’re already being widely shared among Turkish computer and smartphone users.
Virtual private networks and the Tor anonymizing network have been used by PC users in the past to evade government and corporate network censorship, concealing the nature of network traffic in an encrypted “tunnel” to a computer outside the surveilled network. Using these services has become much easier, even on smartphones, thanks to a crop of virtual private network apps for iOS and Android smartphones (such as TunnelBear, F-Secure’s Freedome, Hotspot Shield and Hideman, among others). There’s also Orbot, which routes all of a smartphone’s network traffic through the Tor network.
The Twitter crackdown, along with previous threats of censorship, have given Turks a reason to adopt these services as part of their daily Internet usage. As the Erdoğan government ratchets up its social media crackdown, it’s likely that more and more Turkish citizens will turn to VPNs to get to Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, and the efforts to block access to those services (and the information that flows over them) will become increasingly difficult.
The Venezuelan government already discovered that in its recent efforts to block VPNs; when it moved to block the TunnelBear VPN service, the company launched a new server (TunnelOso.com) to help get around the block.
Update: Turkey is now blocking the IP addresses of Twitter. Further details are posted here.
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