Twitter is blocked in Turkey

Yeah, that's exactly what we had in Russia. The protests were about rigged elections. They also happened to be peaceful. Nevertheless, you can now find a lot of people who call protester names as if that was something provably bad. You can also find a lot of people who outright support everything the state do - thing you could not find before. A lot of people switched from "not caring" to "actively fearing change and swearing on any critique of status quo".

This is hypothesized to be a reaction to a series of audio recordings that were anonymously released over time. These were ridiculously damning, clearly someone is tapping phones without anyone else's knowledge.

Previously:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/27/turkish-pm-corr... http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/iw/contents/articles/origina... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_corruption_scandal_in_Turk...

Some highlights from the "alleged" recordings so far:

- PM calling to get news about an opposing party removed from a TV channel multiple times

- Modifying political poll results to manipulate public opinion

- Getting people of opposing opinions fired

- Buying a large paper shredder to destroy documents

- PM calling son to ask how much money there is at home, son replies saying about 1 trillion, then switches to 3-5 kurush (cents in turkish).

- PM calling son to say "they're raiding the houses, zero out the money". Son says there's only 30 million euros left.

- Call to order the judges to be fixed, and says that a specific person is to be imprisoned.

- Trying to manipulate who goes on the supreme court.

- Says "ignore the prosecutor who's running the corruption investigations". Orders documents ripped up.

(source: http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/yazarlar/25981622.asp)

The official reason for the shutdown is that there were sexual photos of some poor citizen released on twitter against her will, and she complained but twitter refused to take them down. So they decided to shut down the entire website. Yeah, right.

Of course this is ominous that at the end of this month, the local elections will take place. No coincidence.

It's surreal how all this is going down. It's like watching a conspiracy theory movie. Blatant shills everywhere, media manipulation abounds, blatant lies heard on TV from the horse's mouth. We were all skeptical already, it's inevitable when you live in a third world country for years, but wow. When you hear the insiders actually talking to each other, it's a whole new level.

more news on this specific event: http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/turkey-blocks-twitter-after... http://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/2014/03/turkey-erdogan-...

Related old post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7189577

edit: Erdogan stated a few days ago that he didn't care what the world thought, and he would eradicate twitter. He said "how dare they listen to our encrypted phone conversations". It's expected that on the 25th, something huge is going to be released that might sway the elections bigtime. Whoever is posting these are doing it slowly and deliberately, a few days at a time, building up anticipation. So people think that twitter getting shut down is probably related to this.

edit2: All recordings were put on youtube by someone: https://www.youtube.com/user/haramzadeler333

this is how the DNS Look-up for twitter looks like at the moment: http://i.imgur.com/yKmmDYc.jpg

I used TTNET's DNS server for this. It's the biggest ISP in the country.