What Happened to the Internet in Previous Elections?

Located in a critical position 2023 electionsAs in the previous elections, it started to show its effect on the internet weeks before the election. In this context, we saw that many websites, profiles and services were closed. Apart from the election issue, the closest example of this is at the time of the earthquake. twitter access was denied.

Unfortunately, as we go into the past, we often see similar ones. Even if there is no election, it is unfortunately not unusual for access to information to be blocked due to certain events. Here, of course, we do not mean to prevent the spread of news such as suicide, because that situation is on a separate scale. The examples we will count include directing the media and cutting the crisis management down when necessary.

The first internet connection in our country was made on April 12, 1993. The law that provides the opportunity to prevent access was introduced in 2007.

Exactly, this law, dated 23 May 2007 and numbered 5651, “On the Internet Arrangement of Publications and Combating Crimes Committed Through These Publications‘ was named. This law Article 8includes some crimes that may cause the content to be blocked on the internet.

Suicide orientation, obscenityreasons such as gambling are included in this article.

Recently, the Social Media Law, which has been the subject of debate for a long time, has emerged.

This law was initially opposed to the spread of false information. For people trying to disrupt public order on platforms with roughly large traffic 1 to 3 years in prisoneven if the platform refuses to share that person’s data, the traffic bandwidth of that platform can be reduced by up to 90 percent was to be.

With the making of this decision, the ICTA, as per the decision, within 4 hours at the latest It was supposed to throttle the bandwidth.

We’ve given enough background. Now let’s take a look at what happened in the elections. Our first stop is the local elections in 2019.

Most of the press in these elections power was on the side. This situation, which made a lot of noise abroad, caused quite a lot of controversy, especially with the emergence of fake news from these press organizations. Vote results late disclosure and the deletion of major news soon remained on the agenda for a long time.

Internet access was also facing problems during this time period, of course. DisabledWEB’s According to the 2019 report BTKhad blocked 42,000 URLs during the year. This caused the public to be uneasy about the issue of access barrier towards the election period. The circumstances in the previous paragraph did not justify these concerns.

In the general elections held in 2018, there were access problems on social media platforms.

According to a report released in 2019 2018 in the year 2,950 The news was censored. In addition, after the elections, social media platforms were extremely slow, and there were posts on platforms such as Twitter and Ekşi Sözlük. Fortunately, most of them were circumvented via VPN.

In 2014, access to Twitter and YouTube was blocked.

Before the election, social media platforms already can be restricted Along with the phone calls that emerged and allegedly pointed to corruption, Twitter and YouTubewas closed in March 2014. The elections were on 30 March 2014. Platforms that remained closed until after the election were able to be opened with the decision of the Constitutional Court.

Before the general elections held in 2011, the BTK had been the subject of great criticism.

entered into force on August 22, 2011 Draft Procedures and Principles Regarding the Safe Use of the Internetwas the main reason for these criticisms. This regulation gave government agencies the power to control all users. presented in the edit from 4 filter types Unless one of them was chosen, it became difficult to use the internet and access to certain sites was blocked in this context.

In response to this, on May 15, 2011 Don’t Touch My Internet! actions were made. Ekşi Sözlük was among the sites that were requested to be closed during the events. The events in question, “Yes, We Ban!” made a global impact with its slogan.

Although BTKchildren from ‘immoral’ content on the internet ensure the protection for‘ although he states that he has taken this step, the system how it is processed There was uncertainty about it. In this context, the system to personal freedom it was described as an obstacle, as the basis of censorship, and the elections were held in this way.

Let’s see what happened in the current election:

First of all, access to Ekşi Sözlük has been blocked recently, and two domain names used as backups by the site were blocked in turn.

Twitter announced that it has restricted the access of certain profiles at the request of the country’s administration.

Elon Musk has announced that he will share exactly what the government has posted to Twitter in Turkey. (Will be shared when it comes)

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, who had previously faced quite a lengthy censorship, criticized Elon:

“We stuck to our principles in Turkey and won by fighting. This freedom of expression principle, not slogan “If Elon wants to say, ‘We don’t care about freedom of expression if it prevents us from making money,’ he should just say it.”