After the government prevented access to Twitter accounts, Turks are now facing another set of challenges. This time, they are having difficulty getting online, Reuters reported.
Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan became angry at the micro-blogging platform which was where tweets of alleged corruption appeared. Courts in the country blocked access to Twitter on Thursday just hours after Erdogan said he would "wipe out" the social media site. His move was condemned by the international community with the White House saying that the ban endangered democracy and the freedom of speech. Erdogan, however, had earlier said that he did not care what other countries would say about his move, another Reuters report said.
Those who tried to go to the Twitter site were greeted with a page displaying court rulings which said that the site has been blocked because a "protection measure" was in place. However, users were still able to get to Twitter through the use of a virtual private network or VPN software or by altering the setting of their Domain Name System or DNS. The effect of the latter is that it masked the geographical location of their computers, the report said.
The DNS change did not last long, however, as the computers with the DNS numbers that were spread to enable people to circumvent the ban could not anymore access the Internet. The report quoted a Twitter user as saying, "Apparently alternate DNS servers are also blocked in Turkey. New settings are being circulated."
Industry Minister Fikri Isik had said that discussions were ongoing with the San Francisco-based company. He added that the ban on the social media platform would be removed if Twitter would name a country representative and if it would assent to not airing particular content if the courts in Turkey would ask it. However, Twitter had subsequently said through a tweet, "We stand with our users in Turkey who rely on Twitter as a vital communications platform. We hope to have full access returned soon," Reuters reported.
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