This article focuses on the issue of Turkey's prime minister Tayyip Erdogan blocking Twitter & Facebook as it is damaging his reputation. According to the article, Twitter users in Turkey have posted voice recordings and documents which show evidence of the corruption among Erdogan group. The prime minster's action blocking Twitter is for "protection measures". Significantly, Turkish telecoms watchdog stated that the ban was caused by citizens complaining about the social media platform violating privacy. Watchdog claimed that they asked Twitter to remove some content but they failed to do so, and therefore Twitter was blocked by courts in order to prevent victimsation of citizens in the future.
Furthermore, Erdogan made threats about blocking social media sites after the audio recordings on his alleged conversations suggested corruption was leaked online. He also favoured on banning social sites such as Facebook and Youtube in society, in order to protect the country. For example, the steps to prevent spying on the goverment would be to shutting sites down as, ""these people or institutions are [using social media] for all kinds of immorality, all kinds of espionage and spying.". Conversely, Turkish Twitter users quickly worked around this issue by tweeting the hashtag, '#TwitterisblockedTurkey', which rapidly began to trend globally. As a result, many people began to compared Turkey to Iran and North Korea, where social media is strictly controlled and there was also calls for a protest on the streets.
Overall, it is clear that the development of new/digital media has had a impact on countries as some perceive social media as a threat to the heirachy. I disagree with the fact that Turkey has blocked Twitter as it is for citizens to express their views freely. It could be suggested that the emergence of social networking sites has changed the structure of certain countries such as Turkey, as the prime minister strongly see's it as a tool of destroying the country. This contrast to previous years as through traditional forms of media individuals would not of had a great amount of freedom to generate their own content and to voice their opinions.
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