Turkey’s prime minister continues to wage a war against Twitter, and after losing the first battle after the Constitutional Court’s ruling, he is now preparing to accuse it of tax evasion.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan has changed his strategy and is on plan B, which is to completely discredit Twitter, accusing it of tax evasion. He intends to fight not only Twitter, but Facebook and YouTube as well, saying that they may be breaking the law in the same way.
Erdogan stated that Twitter, YouTube and Facebook are international companies created for money and profit, and that Twitter evades taxes.
"These companies, like any international company, will comply with my country's constitution, laws and tax rules," Erdogan said.
Erdogan had promised to “destroy” Twitter. His first attempt at doing so resulted in a complete ban on the network within Turkey just before local elections. Conveniently enough, Turkey said Twitter refused to “take down” published links leading to information relevant to members of the ruling party.
Since people use Google DNS and other similar services to bypass censorship, the country's ISPs were forced to intercept all of these connections. Shortly after Twitter became inaccessible to Turks, YouTube was also blocked for the same reasons, especially since YouTube hosted some videos in which Turkish officials discussed a possible military intervention in Syria.
The international community has accused Turkey of violating basic human rights, saying the bans are a blow to democracy in a country that had hoped to become part of the European Union.
Meanwhile, the Constitutional Court, which Twitter had appealed to, ordered the government to lift the ban. A few days later, a lower court issued a similar ruling regarding the YouTube ban, which was overturned within hours. The original ruling said the 15 videos should be censored, but the rest of the site would remain open.
Google has filed a request with the Constitutional Court to order the ban to be lifted just as it did with Twitter, but there has been no response so far.
