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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

They should be able to watch Twitter's frontend address and ban it accordingly.

Right now the solutions are VPN, Tor and opera mini style proxy services. It's expected that they may go after these too. AFAIK the law requires ISP's to take measures against censorship avoidance methods.

The PM acts against the social media as if it's an existential threat for him.

I am not sure if he rationally calculates these actions or he just can't handle any speech that is not controlled directly by him.(as the leaks indicate, he practically controlled the traditional media for years since)

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They should be able to watch Twitter's frontend address and ban it accordingly.

It's the government. First they'll have to write a contract. Then they'll have to solicit bids. Then...

Meanwhile, Twitter has highly-experienced software engineers and system administrators on staff.

Turkish government is not a typical government in that regard. It's more like an oligarchy where some chosen people can get things done with a simple call in minutes. An example: There is a "Ministry of Telecommunication and Communication" (TİB) and the president of TİB, solely by his own will, can shutdown web sites within 4 hours.

Not if the people he calls have to do something new. DNS blocks are easy. Weathering an active attack might be harder. The question is how far Twitter wants to escalate.

If people keep pushing it with VPNs and censorship avoidance they'll just push Turkey to switch to a whitelisted Turkey-approved Internet and block everything else by default. It's much easier to maintain a whitelist of approved sites when you're censoring people than try to play whack-a-mole and block things that you don't like.

An easy and amusing fix that won't happen would be for Turkish IPs to be directed to a set of proxies shared by Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Wikipedia, and a few other popular sites/services.

Blocking Twitter is disturbing. Blocking much of the web people use daily is a serious escalation that seems unlikely to last in Turkey.

"The PM acts against the social media as if it's an existential threat for him."

Well, it is.

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