Everyone Is Getting Turkey’s Twitter Block Wrong
During the rally, Erdogan also talked about the threat social media, including Facebook and YouTube, poses to family values. He talked about its disruption of privacy, and how these foreign companies do not obey Turkish court orders but obey US and European courts.
In other words, Erdogan’s strategy is to demonize social media.
And Turkey’s not the the first country in the world where this has been tried. Scholarly work by Katy Pearce and Sarah Kendzior on Azerbaijan provides a great example of another country that’s done just that: social media has been subjected to such a fear-mongering campaign that ordinary people stay off because they see it as a threat to their well-being.
.. Erdogan likely still has enough supporters to win elections, but to continue to win, he needs to keep them off social media. His game is to scare them about all that comes from social media. He knows they’ll hear of the corruption tapes. But they are now associated with the same source that maligns housewives as porn-stars.