Nearly 300 Web sites blocked in Turkey since November - a bad image of Turkey
Access to a total of 294 Web sites has been blocked in Turkey since November of last year following the establishment of an Internet bureau within the Department of Telecommunications, according to the Anatolia news agency.Telecommunications Director Fethi Şimşek, in an interview with a correspondent from Anatolia, said 294 Web sites have been permanently shut down for reasons such as obscenity, encouraging people to gamble and for insults directed at Mustafa Kemal Atatürk -- the founder of the modern Turkish Republic -- and the Turkish nation since last November. "Since then, we have received more than 4,000 reports from our citizens that certain Web sites included different types of immorality. After evaluating these [complaints], we decided to permanently block access to 294 Web sites," he noted.
Note EU-Digest: This is not good for the image of Turkey and the freedom of expression in general. One would expect this to happen in either theocracies or communist controlled nations, not in Turkey.
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