For the second time now, “a Turkish court ordered telecom authorities Tuesday to block access to the popular video-sharing website YouTube over videos that allegedly insulted the country’s leaders,” according to the AFP news service which broke the story about an hour ago.

Censorship in Turkey remains to be on the rise, this is definitely not good news to follow Turkey’s ban of WordPress, for which we have a petition for here.

How was the ban uplifted the first time around in early March? Contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t due to public protests or outrage. It was due to YouTube giving into censorship, by bending over to the Turkish authorities:

YouTube has removed all of the offending videos that led a Turkish court to order that YouTube be banned from the country earlier this week, and the ban has been lifted.

More at TechCrunch.

But look, guys! YouTube is trying to be taken seriously:

YouTube said in a written statement, carried by Anatolia, that it was ready to cooperate with Turkish authorities to resolve the dispute.

Cooperate? More like, get threatened into self-censorship.

We can only expect YouTube to make the same mistake it did earlier, aiding the unacceptable curbing of free speech in Turkey. It’s not like they didn’t do it with Thailand. Thank God the developers of WordPress actually have values and standards by not removing the content and blogs that resulted in the ban of their website. Let’s just hope they keep it up.

I don’t know about you guys, but I’m really tempted to just boycott YouTube, for it favors business over free speech and it’s clearly not here to serve the interests of those in restricted societies. So much for media ethics.

Edited:

I just come across this article on BoingBoing, claiming that YouTube did not and never gave into censorship as the videos in question were immediately removed by the users themselves. Which I am still not sure of. What the article quoted says is:

A later court ruling said that the service could be restored after YouTube removed the offending material, Anatolia reported, but it was not clear when that would be.

And what YouTube claims is:

YouTube expressed dismay over the move, adding that the offending video had been removed and that the company was working with the government to resolve the situation.

So if it wasn’t removed by the user, YouTube was going to remove it anyways?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 at 11:21 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.