At the behest of a local court in Turkey, Facebook has blocked an as-of-yet unspecified number of pages that are said to contain images and text that insult the prophet Muhammad. The social network took these steps because otherwise, the country would have banned Turkey’s access to Facebook altogether.
Mashable reports that on Sunday the court in Ankara, Turkey threatened to completely censor out the website unless it removed the pages. According to Mashable’s anonymous source, Facebook complied within 24 hours of receiving the notice.
Throughout January, Turkish officials have been ramping up censorship orders on specific content. When a Twitter account leaked documents about a military raid, Turkey demanded that Twitter take down the whole account, or face a ban on the entire service. Twitter instead took down the few tweets that dealt with the security issue. A day prior to this order, a court ordered that any website showing Charlie Hebdo’s Muhammad cover should be banned.
Last year, Turkey banned both Twitter and YouTube for publishing leaks of a potential military operation in Syria. Twitter was completely banned in the country for two weeks and YouTube was only reinstated after 67 days.
Facebook is open about its censoring policies in foreign countries and says it is obeying the laws. Turkey uses this service to the fullest, which is how it has landed as No. 2 on the list of countries where Facebook blocks the most content . It will be interesting to see how Facebook responds to media pushback to this latest incident, considering the social network released a statement a few weeks ago about how Facebook will always be a place that allows people to speak freely. They claim that one group doesn’t get to dictate what it posts, but Facebook sure seems quick to jump when Turkey says so.
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