Last summer Turkey’s Prime Minister called Twitter “a menace to society”. He has now shut it down. In doing so he has put his country in the same category as Iran and China. Even in Raul Castro’s Cuba and Alexander Lukashenko’s Belarus the micro-blogging site, while monitored, has not been shut down.
For his first nine years in power, Recep Tayyip Erdogan was an effective advertisement for Turkish conservatism. He was dynamic in his management of the economy. In elections he swept all before him. He did not apologise for his religion but did not appear to threaten Turkey’s founding principles either.An administration once seen as relatively clean is reeling from corruption scandals.He has instructed the Turkish Telecommunications Authority to block access to Twitter from Turkish computers as rumours of new corruption allegations against him gathered strength.The Turkish government has lost sight of a basic tenet of democracy. Real power flows from a real mandate, which must be based on freedom of expression.
