Turkey Dammit! WordPress Blocked By Turkish State Censors

(h/t Rafael) An aspect of this is also all the work people will have put into their blogs is now stolen from them by state censors, hopefully this breaks into larger awareness and the govt. is shamed into backing down. Meanwhile I guess there are other platforms and of course you can use flickr as a blog and access it with Hamed Saber’s firefox plug in which gets round filters.

WordPress, a growing blog publishing system, has recently been blocked in Turkey. Founder and main developer Matt Mullenweg is asking for suggestions on ways to go about accessing WordPress within the country, after expressing his disappointment over this decision, which seems to be another strategy for Turkey to curb freedom of speech.
However, users in Turkey apparently don’t know the reason yet:

I’m a wordpress user/developer from Turkey and we are still in shock because of this. The weird thing is nobody knows the reason  I hope this is just a temporary prevention.

Unless it’s a “temporary” blockage, which is highly unlikely, it seems like a campaign is in order. When Morocco blocked YouTube, many bloggers joined forces in a successful campaign to unblock it. They won. When Bahrain blocked Google Earth, a lot of bloggers and journalists expressed their concerns and began targeting international media agencies about it, which caused the country to worry about its worldwide reputation. So I am hoping that Turkish bloggers and WP developers will be moved enough to do something effective in an attempt to unblock this important blogging platform which enables and empowers millions of people worldwide to express their opinions freely. This is a huge step backwards for Turkey. I consider this to be yet another reason why the country is unworthy of membership in the EU. Its human rights record disables the country from achieving any real progress.

When I tried to post a new entry to my blog a few minutes ago, I came across this page. It says: “Access to this site has been suspended in accordance with decision no: 2007/195 of T.C. Fatih 2.Civil Court of First Instance.”

At first, I thought it was my blog but after trying to access WordPress.com’s main page, I noticed the entire WordPress.com domain was blocked by the authorities.

Another ridiculous example of censorship on the Internet content, in Turkey. There are hundred thousands of blogs on WordPress.com and none can be accessed from Turkey now.