Wikipedia blocked in Turkey | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

turkeyblocks.org

850 pointsalansammarone450 comments

I think 2016 will go down as the high water mark for a global Internet. I see a lot of countries looking at the success of China in keeping political control, and the failure of Egypt, Tunisia, etc where the open Internet was used to overthrow the regime and deciding that allowing an open, free internet is not in their best interests. If you think that Western, liberal democracies are exempt from this, just look at the attention "fake news" and "no platform" have been getting. We are going away from the free and open interchange and discussion of ideas (even horrible ideas) to the coercive suppression of ideas (at this point bad ideas, but may not be true in the future).

Add to this that a large portion of the web content is controlled by fewer entities (if Facebook or Google bans your site, you are not going to get very much exposure). Also, we are moving from user controlled general purpose computers to secured, walked garden devices. The government by applying pressure on maybe a dozen companies, can control what type of information the average person is exposed to.

And the whole dodge that the first amendment only applies to the government is dangerous. Freedom of speech is as much a principle as a law. If we get used to large powerful non-government entities suppressing speech we do not like, it will be a brief step to accepting government doing the same or at least pressuring the non-government entities to so it.

> the whole dodge that the first amendment only applies to the government is dangerous

As a supporter of that "dodge", allow me to defend it (though I don't really disagree with your comment in general).

Freedom of speech as a principle has a fundamental tension. One person's freedom to speak must be balanced with another person's freedom to exclude that speech from their private life. Private folks having the ability to go places where they can ignore the people they've chosen to ignore is an important part of why free speech works at all. For instance, we don't need laws against Holocaust deniers, we can simply choose to frequent places where they are excluded.

Freedom of speech as a law is the release valve for this tension. If every private individual and organization in the country has chosen to ignore a person's views, that person is still free to make themselves heard with the government. They can write letters and go to meetings with no fear of punishment for the unpopularity of their beliefs. They can't be legally kept from starting their own private organization where they are not ignored and advertising it to attract others.

Personally, I just find this all to be a very good solution to a difficult problem, so I'm skeptical when I see suggestions that it should be done differently. In this case, the suggestion is that the freedom to exclude (as a principle - there is no law in this direction) should be more tightly regulated. Maybe that's a good idea because of the unique circumstances of the internet, but I'm not yet convinced that it's better than the current regime, which has existed for a long time, and which I think works pretty well.

The problem with "the freedom to exclude" is that the same argument underpins, for just one example: racial segregation. If the blacks want to go to the movies, well then they can have their own movie theater. We can't abridge the proprietor's "freedom to exclude" people from his own business.

Except we can, and we did, and society was better for it. So as it turns out, the "right to exclude" is more of a guideline than a rule, riddled with dozens of exceptions. And "the current regime has existed for a long time" is not very predictive of long-term societal shifts.

So it is here. You are right that there is fundamental tension between the right of free speech and the right of exclusion.

But one of those is a right so fundamental that it appears first when you ask people to list freedoms. The other is something we regularly cede in large and small ways when we live with other humans in a society. Where the two oppose, there is only one way the arc of history can go.

Our grandchildren will be just as puzzled by the "right to exclude" argument as we are when it is made by the generations before us.

>If the blacks want to go to the movies, well then they can have their own movie theater. We can't abridge the proprietor's "freedom to exclude" people from his own business.

I'm sorry, but this doesn't disprove the OP's assertion. Doing business with someone is not the same as speech, and business in general is far more regulated than private life ever was.

As a counterpoint, (in the US) there's still nothing preventing people from excluding minorities from their homes and friendships, and even private organizations are allowed to discriminate by race or sex, and do. (Golf clubs are infamous for this.) Businesses that are "open to the public" are not allowed to; that's the compromise we made, and it's worked out well IMO. If you're a black person, it'd be really awful if you desperately needed a medication, and the one pharmacy in town refused to sell it to you. But being excluded from someone's home or golf club isn't really hurting you.

Similarly, if you run a business, there's many other regulations you must follow: collecting sales tax, using commercially zoned property if you have too many customers, various regulations on how you can treat employees, etc. And part of this is not being allowed to discriminate based on race or sex, unless you have a really really good reason for it (like you're filming a movie about JFK for instance; a black woman isn't going to get far complaining that you didn't audition her for the part). You don't have so many restrictions on your private property.

You misunderstand my argument, and OP's. I'm asserting something like "our children will be protected from firings when they express an unpopular opinion." This would be a regulation that applies to business, so the arguments you construct around business being a regulated sphere are actually arguments in favor of why this will happen. It is also a point that directly disproves OP's assertion that "the first amendment only applies to the government", because here it would be applied to the average employer.

Just how far are you willing to go with this? If people having opinion X, are banned on social media and no private registrar will register their website, no private search engine will index their website, no private employer will hire them, no private bank will do business with them or lend them money, no conference will invite them even for unrelated talks, no open source project will accept their contribution, no private media company will run their advertisements, and no private college will allow them on campus or admit them, are you OK with this situation? After all, they can still write to the government and go to town halls and spout their opinion.

This scenario is not that far-fetched because: 1) There has been more consolidation into fewer large companies, with less competition 2) Many companies share board members with similar opinions and sympathies and have leadership with similar sympathies. 3) Because of social media, it is easy to get a large group of people to put coordinated pressure on a company. 4) This scenario would just be an extreme example of the "no platform" movement which we already have, and which has already successfully pressured individual companies to dissociate with people or opinions.

It is respect for the principle of free speech in the general population that protects us from this scenario. If you are OK with this scenario for some opinions, be aware that throughout history, what is an unpopular opinion has changed, sometimes relatively rapidly.

If people having opinion X, are banned on social media

I'm not in favor of people being banned, but of ideas being flagged - not censored. For example, I don't want to do any kind of business with anyone who is advocating policies that I have a strict moral disagreement with. The nature of that moral disagreement could vary. Popular sentiment should be employed not to determine whether a given piece of media is acceptable or not, but to categorize it; and the strength of those categorial associations can then in turn inform the decisions of advertises, researchers, and so on.

Just to act as a devil's advocate: it seems like only a little better change from banning something to branding it with a tag such as "racist" or "sexist" or any of the reasons why we ban things currently. I do agree that it makes it much easier to research things, since then you do continue to have access to the primary source of truth rather than screenshots from some shady websites. The problem seems to be that some things are just too vile to leave on the public internet... Personally, I'm not too sure how to deal with this. e.g. religious rhetoric can frequently be incredibly incendiary and motivate a large group of people to violence.

They are doing this to Scott Adams, Trump, Snowden and others on twitter. I'm following their accounts and seldom times see any updates from them, the updates are filtered (shadowbanned).

Scott Adams himself mentions the same: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/159566176596/am-i-shadowbanned-...

If you tag people with whom you have a strict moral disagreement to avoid doing business with them, this is actually what national socialists did back in the 1930s with their own Jewish community. It is a slippery rope.

The solution to that is simple. Apply free speech rules to entities, even private ones, that have grown to have government-like powers in the lives of people. They serve the same function as government.

If you think that solution is simple, keep thinking about it.

>One person's freedom to speak must be balanced with another person's freedom to exclude that speech from their private life. Private folks having the ability to go places where they can ignore the people they've chosen to ignore is an important part of why free speech works at all.

That's not how it works. The "public square" is supposed to be open to all opinions. If you want protection, you have to retreat into the cloister of a private establishment that disallows this. In the past, it was not possible to bypass the public square, and thus to avoid exposure to the sentiment of anyone who cared to stand there and hand out his papers or cry his opinion. This was a necessary part of travel between private establishments that used their limited property rights over a small piece of land to exclude such stumping within that small parcel only.

The internet is blurring the lines of the public square. We no longer need to traverse the public streets where all views are free to be expressed; via the internet, people are instantly teleported from cloistered space A to cloistered space B. People are starting to feel it is their right to go about their businesses without being exposed to things they dislike, which, whether they realize it or not, is a very worrisome disavowal of the principles undergirding our freedoms. The effect of this on discourse, democracy, and all of our freedoms should not be understated.

Ironically, rather than unifying mankind and increasing sympathy and understanding, we are using network technology to maximize comfort by crafting artificial "safe spaces" where patrons never even have to be exposed to thoughts they dislike. That's bad.

The divide has never been more palpable than during the last election cycle. Nearly half the country was so misinformed that they didn't even believe the outcome was possible, and hostility and misunderstanding are reaching frightening heights, in some cases escalating into violence (post-election rioting, Berkeley).

Whatever is creating those circumstances needs to be fixed, and my belief is that a generation that is used to muting and blocking anything they dislike and spending most of their time in hyper-sanitized environments safe for corporate sponsorship and being coddled in public spaces to minimize corporate liability is no small part in this.

I'm interested in why you are commenting in here, rather than (say) Youtube or 4Chan. Might it be because the active moderation here allows for a certain type of discourse?

Yes. I don't intend to say that no one should be able to organize their forums or exclude some speech; doing so is a critical part of maintaining something functional and workable.

We don't have to fling to one extreme or the other. There is a moderate position here. And remember, this is about the importance of free speech as a social principle. If we don't cherish our rights, they'll vanish. I'm not necessarily advocating any specific legal changes.

HN is a boutique site that targets a specific niche. I would guess it has a few thousand active users. It's developed and designed specifically to facilitate discussion on issues that fit its niche and target audience.

Facebook, Twitter, et al, on the other hand, are platforms that function much like public utilities. They are used by the masses to disseminate speech of all kinds. They target a generic user base and suggest that they can all use the site to follow their individual interests.

Beyond the mere target audience of "everyone", Facebook and Google have massive amounts of control. The penetration of Google and Facebook is probably almost exactly equal with the penetration of internet service (and to some extent, both have projects that take them beyond that sphere). If you use the internet, the likelihood is that significant amounts of your usage are under the direct control of these corporations.

Facebook boasts over 1 billion daily active users. That is 1/8 of the earth's population. That is MASSIVE -- far further reaching than any monopoly in the pre-internet age. Facebook is also the platform that people depend on most heavily for self-expression. It's a central hub that many people visit multiple times each day; some groups and businesses are now run entirely out of Facebook. Functionally, it is not unlike the pre-internet public square, and it's a frequent crossroads for almost all internet users. As with past public squares, it's possible to avoid it if you're trying really hard, but you essentially have to be a digital recluse.

This applies similarly to Google for search, email, and mobile.

As such, it's scary when such powerful platforms that present with such generic mission statements and see such widespread adoption start erasing political speech because they deem it "offensive" at the corporate level.

That is a ridiculous amount of control, and it's something we've never experienced before. Even the broadcasters of the 20th century were limited by the reach of radio waves to specific metros, and they usually had several easily accessible competitors (that people would actually use, unlike FB's direct competitors). We used to worry about the large influence of these people so much that it was illegal to own more than a certain number of major media outlets in the same market (that restriction was removed in 2003, IIRC). [We also used to have the Fairness Doctrine to compel broadcasters to accurately present both sides of the political issues.]

People recognized the damage to the public square posed by moving the discussion off to corporate-controlled broadcast media and wanted a way to check the power of the broadcasters. We seem to have forgotten about that risk, just at the moment when the central control of a small handful of people is most potent.

Imagine that printing press manufacturers had the ability to stop press owners from setting certain things to the page. That reflects the reality of the publishing mediums we depend on today. That should be worrisome.

I'm stopping short of suggesting a legal solution, but just speaking to this as an important social principle, we should all be disgusted with the conduct from the major online platform providers. Such general, widely-used platforms are betraying the public and our principles and values in favor of open dialogue by working to distort the landscape of public opinion and curtail the speech of the political, philosophical, or moral enemies of the corporate overlords.

Why is it bad to create artificial safe spaces? You're implicitly saying that private networks shouldn't be allowed to exist. So if I set up a forum and hang a sign on the landing page saying 'commies will be banned' you're saying that That's not acceptable? Certainly I'm attempting to create comfort by establishing a virtual space where I can enjoy discourse free of communist ideology, but if I find communism intolerable why shouldn't I be allowed to do that? certainly that's an attempt to employ the network for comfort rather than doing the work of ideological disputaation, but people use the internet for comfort and convenience all the time, like any technology. I don't see how you can argue that certain thins like political ideologies should be subject to differing technological rules, that seems neither logical nor practical.

I don't argue this. I think it's fine to set up a forum that only allows pro-communist or pro-capitalist posts. In fact, I think doing so is critical to building communities that actually function.

The issue that demonstrates the loss of free speech as a social value is that a large number of people enthusiastically pursue and endorse the censorship of legitimate political discourse on the networks that have general applicability and have become the de-facto publication platforms of the modern world.

Facebook, Twitter, et al are not really networks by themselves, at least not in most respects; they're platforms for networks. You use them to build your own communities; communities of your friends, family, businesses, etc. The platforms don't present with any ideology because they present as applicable to every ideology. If they're going to make such representations, it's not unreasonable to expect them to adhere to them with some consistency.

Additionally, when 1/8 of the world's population depends on Facebook for its news and information, and Facebook presents itself as a place that's appropriate for all users, I think it is completely legitimate to hold them to a reasonably strict standard of fairness. Regardless of the legal situation, we can and should be doing this socially.

If we enshrine free speech as a social value, we should all be concerned when good-faith political discussions are removed from these platforms, no matter how repugnant we find the actual views expressed. All views must be allowed to compete on the marketplace of ideas. Forcing legitimate policy positions into hushed tones only builds a tension that leads to a violent snap.

The core question is whether Facebook, Google, et al have reached a level where their corporate-enforced censorship policies have a real effect on the aggregate political dialogue. I think that it's undeniable that they do at this point.

> Ironically, rather than unifying mankind and increasing sympathy and understanding, we are using network technology to maximize comfort by crafting artificial "safe spaces" where patrons never even have to be exposed to thoughts they dislike. That's bad.

This is a bad characterisation; it was much easier to ignore stuff you didn't like before the internet. The internet is also not to blame for politics - while it helped intensify things, it wasn't the 'safe spaces' that gave you Trump, but the hysterical fearmongering that the conservatives had been doing for almost a decade beforehand.

I'm not sure how you think people were 'forced' to see views they didn't like before the internet.

They weren't able to dismiss people who resisted by doing the equivalent of "unfriend"ing them. If you are in the same physical space with someone, the only way you can enforce silence (rather than just pleading for it) is to leave or compel the property owner to exert force against the other guest. In the public square, no one can exert this force over complaints as petty as "I don't like what he's saying".

Some types of public demonstrations or forums require permits and the like, but the public square is still available to anyone with a point to make, and if you're in the same physical area/space, you're going to see it, like it or not.

As the bulk of our discussion offloads from public spaces or common community gathering places to curated digital gardens where no one knows the difference if you unfollow their feed, we lose the forces that make it difficult to ignore each other. That makes it much easier to stay closed-minded.

The problem is that the your entire argument rest on the assumption that every individual have equal power, which is objectively not true if you allow for property to accumulate in the hands of a small elite.

The central flaw of libertarianism is that it depend on property rights to essentially be worthless to work in the real world, as any scarcity allows for a libertarian dictatorship based solely on the idea that property rights are sacred, and need to be protected by the state.

> The central flaw of libertarianism is that it depend on property rights to essentially be worthless to work in the real world, as any scarcity allows for a libertarian dictatorship based solely on the idea that property rights are sacred, and need to be protected by the state.

Could you reiterate this statement for me? I wasn't able to fully grok the meaning.

Edit: Spelling.

The problem is that rights don't have meaning if they don't have real world effects and in the real world you need resources to exercise any freedom making freedom a limited good dependent on "goods that can be property".

i.e. you end up with a clash between the right to own/control property and any other right unless you have a post scarcity society with limitless resources.

I am not arguing that we should all go communist im arguing that Marx have point when he claimed that capitalism will devolve back into something similar to mercantilism* if property is allowed to accumulate in the hands of a few clans/corporations[1].

I know im being a heretic but someone have to as the current naive idea that freedom is not linked with real world resources can only lead to the erosion of any real meaning of the word freedom.

[1]in Smiths day corporations looked a lot like AT&T or Google today and Smith was a critic of the power concentrated within corporations like the British East-india Company(the target of the Boston tea part btw.)

Yup, censorship is now a global trend. We shouldn't forget that it also happens in many Western countries such as Denmark, Finland, France, ... https://explorer.ooni.torproject.org/world/

And if we look in particular at government censorship of Wikipedia or some articles in it we find quiet a few Western countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_censorship_of_Wikip...

I don't understand what the "anomalies" this site detects in Denmark, Finland, and France represent, but the site itself says that they don't necessarily represent censorship and that it has only confirmed censorship in the following 12 countries: Russia, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, India, Indonesia, Greece, Sudan, Belgium, Cyprus and Korea.

Just FYI, Youtube is heavilly sensored in the Czech Republic (we have very strong laws against political extremism, like jail time for extreme right wing speech..). But I don't know of any actual domains that are blocked. The government doesn't need a great firewall to censor. They can simply slap a 2 year jail sentence on anyone who shares a right wing video and that's enough to get youtube to censor itself.

Edit: I mean extreme right wing, like KKK, nazi stuf ect.

The UK, France, Spain and possibly others have laws against "glorifying terrorism". In Germany, Nazi symbols and propaganda are banned. I don't necessarily agree with these laws, but this is quite different from blocking the entire Wikipedia.

Is there jail time for extreme left wing speech? Like Che Guevara, Mao, Hugo Chavez? Not arguing -- just genuinely curious how extremism is defined there.

So the videos are still accessible and can simply be shared offline?

Just use a URL shortener and print up links to pass around. Sneakernet still can't be tracked

I just checked, and there is no apparent censorship of youtube going on (e.g. you can find Czech neo-nazi music without any issues).

The map has "Confirmed censorship cases" and Denmark, Finland and France, ... all fit there. For Denmark for example:

https://explorer.ooni.torproject.org/country/DK

They're blocking http://thepiratebay.org, that's straight up censorship.

> They're blocking http://thepiratebay.org, that's straight up censorship.

No, that's anti-piracy judgements.

The latter being censorship is really an opinion rather than undisputed, fact, or a guaranteed majority opinion.

I'm Greek and I have no idea of wikipedia (or other) kind of censorship by the Greek state. I know that the Greek mass media is tightly controlled by the Greek oligarchy and Greece is 88th in Freedom of Speech Index and falling - but their grip over the populace has been severely weakened the last 5 years.

I have no idea of internet state-level censorship though, are there any specific

All the sites I see blocked in Greece in those stats are for foreign online gambling.

Denmark, Finland, France and many other countries censor The Pirate Bay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countries_blocking_access_to_T...

That link says: blocking access due to copyright issues. Respectfully, I don't think you're doing justice to the Turkish freedom of speech issue of Wikipedia being blocked by bringing up The Pirate Bay.

> That link says: blocking access due to copyright issues. Respectfully, I don't think you're doing justice to the Turkish freedom of speech issue of Wikipedia being blocked by bringing up The Pirate Bay.

Can we both agree that both of these things shouldn't happen and ThePirateBay and Wikipedia shouldn't be censored by any country?

I did not mean to compare the two cases at all and am sorry if it came out that way. I just wanted to answer the parent post on 'what the "anomalies" this site detects in Denmark, Finland, and France represent' by pointing out that TPB is blocked/censored in these countries. I only meant to point out one possible reason why the above site listed these countries.

So… that's a case of dishonestly conflating shutting down a locally illegal operations and speech/political censorship. Hardly helping the case.

Denmark censors a lot more than just TPB, though it is probably the one website that causes most people to circumvent the censorship.

In Denmark it all started out with blocking child porn sites, then it was expanded to copyright infringement, then it was expanded to companies operating illegally (counterfeit goods stores, illegal gambling, alternative medicine stores) and most recently the government started blocking "terror propaganda" [1] - which means they have begun censoring political speech.

This is in spite of a constitution forbidding censorship, with the counterpoint being that since it's technically private companies doing the censorship, it doesn't violate the constitution. Even though ISPs will be taken to court if they don't censor sites [2]

[1] https://www.information.dk/indland/2016/10/statsligt-debatto...

[2] https://www.version2.dk/artikel/dansk-internetudbyder-traekk...

Sorry, but I did not intend to compare or conflate the two cases. I wanted to give an answer to the parent poster why those countries might be listed on the above site.

The French definitely censor more than just pirate sites.

As far as I can tell from the linked site, it is only thepiratebay.org that is censored in Denmark, and I can confirm that this censorship is dependant on your internet provider.

My landline provider gives me access, but my mobile provider (TDC, same provider as the one tested on the linked site) does not give me access, saying that a court has banned access to the site, but not quoting any specific case.

I don't think this list is complete. Qatar comes to my mind, where while being there recently, I've had multiple instances where given sites were blocked - i.e. redirect to censor.qa and passing unique query parameters along w/ your IP address.

They're basing their results on measurements that anyone can make, if there are very few people who do these measurements in a certain country then most probably no censorship case may come.

You talk about Belgium, but the wikipedia doesn't (I read it from Belgium right now). Could you elaborate on this Belgium censorship information ? Thanks!

IDK about censorship, but France had strict laws when it comes to Nazi support or Holocaust denial.

Click on a country, then click on "Blocked Sites".

Great summary. One missing thing is that goverments are getting better at using free Internet for propaganda. In Poland we have open Internet so far, but we are increasingly exposed to Russian goverment news/comments that are factually wrong but repeated consistently.

Basically - we see the same thing we already saw with free market. It is not free by itself. Countries and companies can use it to establish monopolies.

Freedom is not for free. It is something we need to define, establish and then continuously fight for it.

Being a Russian, I am naturally very curious about this idea of the Russian propaganda getting a stronger and stronger influence over the minds of people in other countries. Could you kindly elaborate on the following issues that mystify me:

- Where do people get the Russian news and why do they care about what Russia has to say? I mean, I don't follow Polish news (or French news, or German news, etc.); so why would people get their information from the Russian outlets?

- You said that the Russian news/comments are factually wrong. What do you use as a reference (which sources would give you factually correct information and how do you verify that it is factually correct)?

Those are honest questions; I am not defending the Russian outlets in any way - I am just curious about how people perceive different news media

Yes, I can understand your wondering (I'm a Russian too). When I hear about the waves of Russian propaganda all around the globe I can't stop to ask myself a question: "how we become so powerful?". I'm afraid that nowadays some people tend to call any opposite opinion in their countries as a Russian propaganda. And I can understand that with a lack of good opposition/alternative media people start to read Russia Today, just like we here in Russia read BBC and other Western media, especially when we think that our state media tries to hide something from us.

By the way, do you know what a main evil scheme Kremlin uses to brainwash the citizens, to set them against the West? It's not some made-up, fake news. They made a few websites instead, where anyone can read translated articles about Russia, published in Western media. And that's it. As you understand, it's much harder to find something pro-Russian there to translate, than vice versa.

On a serious note, I think that the only way to fight with the streams of fakes (regardless the country) is a restriction of anonymity on the Internet.

> On a serious note, I think that the only way to fight with the streams of fakes (regardless the country) is a restriction of anonymity on the Internet.

Please stop suggesting that.

There's zero evidence that removing anonymity works and in that process we lose our online privacy. And I think anonymity is precisely what we need to preserve freedom.

Also people are simply jackasses, real names or not. If you don't believe me, engage in conversations on Facebook about politics sometimes. There's nothing that shakes my faith in humanity faster.

Don't give me wrong, I'm not protecting this idea. But I don't like some alternatives either, like banning the access to "enemy media". And it's more shameful when some democratic country doing it.

I think, the main problem is that Internet was not designed for the masses originally. In 90s you could find there mostly scientists, programmers, hackers, writers etc. Here, in Russia, everything was concenrated in Fidonet and we had our own Eternal September [1] (2000-...) when dial-up access become cheaper. So, what to do now? To be honest, I don't know. I'm not promoting segregation either. I think it's pointless to make a modern version of Usenet/Fidonet/... for closed groups of like-minded people.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

> When I hear about the waves of Russian propaganda all around the globe I can't stop to ask myself a question: "how we become so powerful?"

Thank you! These are my thoughts exactly. I mean, I remember the Soviet times, when the Russian intellectuals, having zero confidence in the official news, used to listen to foreign radio stations over AM radio – Voice of America and BBC World Service (and perhaps Deutsche Welle too) being the most prominent among them. What happened that now the Western media loudly complains about RT? One might even think that the situation has now been reversed, and that the Western world somehow trusts RT more than they trust their mainstream media. But this does not make any sense!

RT played the long game, and has done a surprisingly good job of gaining a following in fringe viewers throughout the US. Anecdotally, I participated pretty heavily in the first couple weeks of the Occupy Wall Street protests in Manhattan. For the first week or so, we got very little news coverage, and a lot of the established media was downplaying the movement, waiting for it to blow over, or picking the craziest people they could find out of the crowd to discredit us. Russia Today was one of the few news organizations who came out early, giving us positive coverage, and reflecting the views of the protesters more or less accurately. A lot of my friends became RT viewers because RT legitimately succeeded where the domestic media failed.

RT has played the strategy of going in and eating the domestic media's lunch when they hesitate to cover legitimate stories, and that has given them a dedicated following. Unfortunately, as time has passed, it has grown more clear (at least to me) that this bona-fide coverage is the bait they pull people in with, and that their coverage in general is of the journalistic quality of Fox News. They use the same tactics of lying through omission, stoking panic, appealing to emotion, and selecting stories to promote an agenda.

As for the social media shilling, the situation is extremely nuanced. At this point there are probably tens of thousands of organizations astroturfing social media to promote their interests. Russia gets a lot of attention, because they seem to be doing it on the largest scale in terms of influencing geopolitics, but I agree that they aren't the only ones doing it, and that if we make them stop, the problem won't go away. The media has spoken up a lot about Russia's twitter/facebook botting and shilling, but if we were to take a much closer look at the data, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to see some shady domestic political think tanks and action committees doing it to the same extent. In fact, the shadowy domestic PACs engaging in astroturfing are probably ecstatic that Russia has taken the focus (and blame) off of them! The Internet has become a ideological battleground, and at this point, anybody who has any power to gain/lose has rolled up their sleeves and entered into the fray. I'm not quite sure what to do about it.

Hi. Sorry to single out your country in particular, but its hard to talk in general :)

We get a lot of comments in main Internet portals which present Russians as victims of NATO aggression in case of Ukrainian conflict. It always misses the point of who invaded who.

There is a lot of comments threatening Poland with nuclear conflict, in particular after US Army established its presence here.

These are examples. But it looks like a lot of comments have particular key and great consistency.

Are those comments that you are talking about online publications of some established Russian media outlets, or are they just comments of some random visitors to the sites?

As for invasion and NATO aggression, I think it’s worth reminding oneself that there are several opposite narratives battling each other and pushing different agendas — God knows whose. Russia is certainly meddling in Ukranian affairs (and it’s revolting) — but invasion? Isn’t it an act of war? Aren’t countries at war with each other if one country invades another? As for NATO, both NATO and Russia seem to be saber-rattling, each side responding to the demonstrations of the other by further threats. This is plain madness!

Sorry, I didn't mean to start this discussion.

I just wanted to point out that Internet due to its global nature is vulnerable to attack on truth by actors with enough money and defined agenda. This kind of attack can be similar to spam/ddos attack in its nature. So basically exploiting Internet freedom.

If we don't build in mechanisms to prevent this, we will loose anyway. Even if it was possible to keep Internet free.

I see that the only positive result of my comment is that it motivated you and several Russian readers to create accounts here and take part in discussion. I hope we will have much more opportunity to participate in IT related topics. You guys are some of the best people in the field and we will all benefit from your expertise.

Ukraine and Russia ar at what exhausts the definition of a war - both Russian and Ukrainian military are fighting over a piece of land.

Not from Poland and not in an any way affected country, but I believe I can answer your first question, and it comes down to basically Rossiya Segodnya.

Here's an investigation that discovered them operating in the Baltics: https://en.rebaltica.lv/2017/04/sputniks-unknown-brother/

Long story short, they open a news portal where tracking the ownership is almost impossible and where there is absolutely no hindsight on how do they monetize what they do, they attract readers by appealing to the Russian minorities, trying to create some sort of panic between them and hoping to create a chain reaction.

I am from Germany so I don't know about your first question.

For your second question: I myself don't know too much about this in regards to the internet, but I have read in a couple of white papers that

1: a large majority of Russians (esp. those in rural areas) have TV as their main source of news. Print is only a minority (has small relevance).

2: Most TV is controlled by the government and if they are not they don't criticize the government as there is a fear of being shut down.

3: The Russian media is said to state false Fact as well as to distort Facts/Events. I don't have the time to link specific sources but you can find what I said if you research freedom of press on google and google scholar. There are also renown sites with lists such as a freedom of speech index. Russia ranks 148.

https://rsf.org/en/ranking

https://scholar.google.de/scholar?hl=en&q=russia+freedom+of+...

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14616690320001763... http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1081180011291722...

In the case of the Baltics, it's not so much the natives that are under the increasing propaganda. [1] It's the Russians who were transported here during the various occupations by the empire & soviets. These people weren't kicked out after the collapse of the union, but most of them have never been interested in the local culture. They haven't learned the language [2], aren't interested in going back to Russia even if paid for, and often don't hold local citizenship. They view Putin as their leader, they celebrate Russian holdiays, shoot new year's fireworks according to Moscow time, and cry about the fall of the union. Basically these are people who are waiting for the reunification of the motherland and it doesn't take much for them to eat up any propaganda that aligns with that view.

Digitally they live as Russians, they don't use facebook but use VK etc. Because they don't understand the language the only local TV/newspapers/media they consume is Russian. The local Russian media is mostly funded by the Kremlin and has their agenda aligned accordingly.

In total, it's hard not to see this as preparation work for Putin to come save all these Russians by occupying us once again.

[1] Certainly there is the Russian troll army unit who roams the local news comment sections. However they aren't that clever. They are mostly easy to spot, have been spreading the same crap for 15 years, and are often called out.

[2] It's not just that old people don't learn the local languages. A huge number of Russians flat out refuse to teach their newborn children the local languages, insisting on Russian. The continued existance of Russian kindergartens/schools is ensuring that the division among the local populace won't go away.

Well, thank you very much for not kicking them out! Especially those, who were "transported" during Russian Empire times. So very kind of you :)

Not to start a debate, but why would they want to integrate into a culture that quite explicitly hates them?

In my experience the common reason among Russian parents who send their children into local language schools and want their children integrated cite "a better future" and economic opportunities.

Also, you make a sarcastic remark regarding not kicking people out as if that is what everyone does and doesn't require special mention. It just so happens that moving people forcibly around has been the modus operandi of various Russian regimes. [1] They come invade us, and then gather up the intellects and other elite members of the community and ship them off to Siberia in cargo trains. Not only that, but wives are separated from their husbands, children from their parents, families split apart and sent to different parts of the Siberian woods to make sure they won't find anyone to speak their native language with. Then people who already speak Russian are massively transported into the country to help with the Russianification efforts. [2]

To make matters worse, it's not like all of this is only some historic event that is looked at in shame like Germany and the nazis. Putin and his regime, and the local non-integrating Russians think that Soviet Union was the best thing ever and that its fall was the greatest tragedy of the 20th century.

There have been monstrous attempts by Russia at obliterating the Baltic cultures. The remaining non-integrating Russians are pawns in this culture war. I do think that we have been more than fair in offering them an opportunity to integrate into the community and to leave the atrocities of the past behind us. When they refuse, but also don't go back to Russia and keep praising the historic invading Russians as heroes. Well it's dissapointing, insulting, and frankly for our little nations it's also a case of fighting for the survival of our cultures.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_deportations_from_Eston... ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_transfer_in_the_Sov...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification

>Where do people get the Russian news and why do they care about what Russia has to say? I mean, I don't follow Polish news (or French news, or German news, etc.); so why would people get their information from the Russian outlets?

Russia will provide funding to various conspiracy nuts, contrarians and such, who then write and/or translate shitty "news" articles that are then consumed by people that want someone to confirm their bias.

They also pay people (located in Russia, mostly) to post pro-Kremlin opinions on the internet, and if you are not aware of that, it may seem like there's a lot of people that disagree with the "mainstream media" that are "lying to us".

Another thing they do is try and control the expat organizations of Russian speaking minorities in the West (and Central Europe too). These people are often relying on Russian language news so they are easier to influence.

They also like to finance eurosceptic political parties (e.g. National Front[1]), to try and break-up the EU.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Front_(France)#Russia...

Just to give you one answer, at least in the United States, a not insignificant number of people read or watch RT.com, and -- this is really terrible, but it's true -- they aren't aware that "RT" stands for "Russia Today" and is basically a pro-Russian news outlet. I'm not sure how you folks view Russia Today, but at least in the United States, people that know that "RT" == "Russia Today" consider it very pro-Russian, almost propaganda. People that don't know that it's a Russian news source generally just consider RT like most other news sources in the United States. I've got friends on Facebook that post RT links like they post CNN links or something and they're completely unaware of its origin.

I must confess that I too watch RT sometimes. I was initially drawn to them by the total openness of their broadcasting — I could go to their website and either watch RT America live or watch recordings of any of their major programs. I have never seen other networks do so (perhaps with the exception of Bloomberg) — and I looked at CNN, Fox, and BBC at least. So at least for this RT deserves some credit.

Now, having watched RT from time to time over a certain period, I learned to distinguish between the shows that blatantly push the Kremlin agenda, and others that do not necessarily do so and are more interested in being a non-mainstream platform of inquiry into the world affairs, and of criticism of the world policies rather than being a carrier of the Russian point of view.

Also, I couldn't help wondering about what it is that ostensibly makes RT so different from other media networks. It seems to me that if RT is propaganda (which it very well may be) then so is CNN, or MSNBC, or Fox, or even BBC. I don’t know. Perhaps, despite all my attempts to resist, I am infected by the Russian propaganda beyond cure.

> even BBC

Two recent examples of BBC 'impartiality'

https://twitter.com/maitlis/status/854308223838371840

https://twitter.com/bbcnickrobinson/status/85500451929767936...

With an election in just a few weeks time, two major BBC 'journalists' who support the right-wing, pro-Establishment British Conservative Party, brazenly attacking the left-wing (anti-Establishment) Labour Party candidate.

The BBC is a state broadcaster that has always been pro (British/Western) Establishment, but always in the past with a veneer of impartiality (more delusional right-wingers even absurdly accuse it of being left-wing).

Now, with the possibility of the first moderately left-wing British Prime Minister in decades, and public faith in established media at an all time low anyway, top BBC staff aren't even trying to hide their right-wing political bias any more.

> what it is that ostensibly makes RT so different from other media networks

1) Different kinds of propaganda. Fox, CNN, MSNBC are businesses that reflect the biases of audience, owners, employees, etc. RT bias is support of the Kremlin.

2) Different levels of commitment. Fox, MSNBC, CNN are businesses pursuing their own interest. Their purpose is making money. RT was set up purely for propaganda. It's purpose is spreading propaganda. The "alternative news" is merely a method to deliver the propaganda.

Fox opposed Trump but then flipped to suit their interest. RT will never oppose Putin.

If Putin decided he wanted to genocide Jews (a totally unrealistic example just to illustrate the point), RT would come up with a reason why it's unavoidable, justified, and the US's fault anyway. If Trump came up with the same idea, even Fox news would probably oppose it.

Watching competing sources of propaganda is extremely interesting and entertaining, for sure.

I read Russian, French, and English language news from as many sources as I can find to try and get a relatively good idea of what actually happens in the world, and if you want to call out bias, try nbc before you talk about rt. Rt's reporting is closer to the reality almost every time and they much less commonly bury stories unfavourable to a certain united States party specifically.

So, I'm just talking about RT here. Obviously, it's not the only place in the world with bias. I didn't include my own RT consumption habits in the paragraph above because it's not about me, it's about RT, and how a pretty large group of Americans view it.

That's hilarious. I suppose the lack of .ru trips them up

Weird, Bulgaria is also seemingly being targeted by systematic Russian propaganda and fake news via news sites with anonymous authors and no citations, and via fake profiles on social media sites that like, share and comment on said sites.

> and via fake profiles on social media sites that like, share and comment on said sites.

The same happens in Romania. In fact, I've called out a couple of such profiles on FB already, during the recent anti-Government demonstrations. If you're careful enough it's easy to spot them, one of them for example had shared pro-Assad news (which us Romanians don't care that much about), some traditional music that now only appeals to those 60+ and some nationalistic-sounding articles about Romania.

"I think 2016 will go down as the high water mark for a global Internet. I see a lot of countries looking at the success of China in keeping political control, and the failure of Egypt, Tunisia, etc where the open Internet was used to overthrow the regime and deciding that allowing an open, free internet is not in their best interests."

Peak Internet:

http://blog.kozubik.com/john_kozubik/2010/12/peak-internet.h...

I think it's cyclical-- remember the original consumer internet was based on portals such as MiniTel, CompuServe, AOL, Prodigy, then the portal concept shifted to a search/Google based "portal" as people wanted content access outside of the curated portal content.

Walled garden devices are pretty irrelevant though because unless that wall blocks the internet, there is little effect. Current walled gardens are about application security and not about actual content-- the most locked down iPhone can still access the open internet -- so device walled gardening has nothing to do with information access generally.

Also the obsession with "stopping fake news" coming from the American left is what's causing Google and Facebook to respond -- they couldn't care less about fake news -- they are responding to market pressures. Google and Facebook aren't leading the charge against fake news in the US -- leftist activists are the ones screaming the loudest because they are still fuming about Trump.

In Europe, its governments that are pressuring companies to censor things -- for example the so-called right to be forgotten. Governments are the problem not the companies -- at least in Europe.

Why would Facebook or Google care about fake news? They don't -- until a major portion of their constituencies start howling about it. Fakebook and Google weren't unilaterally concerned about content veracity -- until a large segment of people started complaining about it.

>> so device walled gardening has nothing to do with information access generally.

I disagree, on iOS specifically you have no practical way to install/sideload your own applications and thus what you can and can not do is wholly controlled by Apple. Applications determine what parts of the Internet you can actually use.

My impression of "Fake News" is that it is a new push for political correctness and censorship in news publications, while it does not improve things like the quality, transparancy and trustworthiness of sources and references of news.

It could also be interpreted as a push for platform control; if you want to influence people using our platform, fucking pay for it!

Google and Facebook might care about "Fake News" (i.e. non vanilla left or mainstream media type slant which is what the term often means although certainly real "fake news" exists) for reasons of self interest.

The policies of nationalists aren't all friendly in principal to the global agendas of these outfits. On imported labor for instance.

The moral principle that prefers letting people have their say to shutting them up applies to us all.

But things like the US 1st Amendment is an actual laws that can be enforced by courts, and American courts have mostly developed good jurisprudence about it. That includes applying it mostly to governments -- for reasons that sanerj goes into in detail.

The "mostly" is interesting here. There was a case of a woman handing out leaflets in a town where all the land was owned by one company. The US courts ruled (rightly, I think) that the company was not allowed to stop her.

Today, private enterprises like YouTube and Facebook are being used as if they were public services and are in a position to censor. So I don't rule out something like the company-town rule forcing internet giants respect free speech.

But realistically, I don't see todays political culture doing that even-handedly. In fact I see it being far more likely to force these companies to censor.

This problem is every bit as much a political and cultural problem as it is a technological one. So I largely agree.

But from a technological perspective, even if 2016 is the high water mark of the "centralized" internet, a new internet is forming. That which you lament is the natural result of a centralized system. It's something that the early creators of the internet have warned about since its inception. But now as the incumbents centralize control, a new generation of technologists (helped by many of those early creators) are constructing the underpinnings of "Web 3.0", a decentralized internet built on Ethereum, IPFS, WebTorrent, BigchainDB, SOLID et al.

There is plenty left to do, it is still a newborn child... nobody knows where this goes. But come 2030, I agree we'll look back on 2016 as the high water mark of the centralized internet. But instead of longing for how things were in the 1990s and 2000s, we'll say "good riddance".

All that said, the battle needs to happen on the political front at the same time, which makes EFF, FFTF, and ACLU so important.

i don't know what else we could have expected. the internet that people have access to is no longer decentralized. we need more of this. more systems that cannot be controlled or censored by any one party. applications, devices, and services that obey the users, rather than the developers, vendors, or service providers. not only do we need these things, we need to find effective, decentralized ways of pushing their adoption.

i've done some work in this space, but it is a hard path. we need more people working and innovating in creating viral alternatives to the present system. not only in technology, but in business. we don't need an economic landscape composed of kingdoms and fiefs, we need economic democracies: cooperatives and other worker-focused businesses. we need stronger communities. more strong connections to each other.

Not trying to throw salt in the argument for democracy, but isn't your argument the digital equivalent of "Why doesn't everyone do everything for themselves to overthrow the dependency on unstable corporations"?

It'd be great if everything was decentralized, everyone encrypted all their messages, used tor to mask their activities. At some point though, these would require the average person to learn a lot about the network and systems they use, otherwise they risk not using it correctly and invalidating the point. If these services are provided to them, they don't have to think about all these factors when using the network, they can specialize, allowing it to be more accessible. It seems that the people vote has been on more accessible, but it is starting to look like the foxes are running the hen house for the internet these days.

That being said, what Turkey is doing is scary.

> The government has not officially commented on the outage. But the Transport, Maritime Affairs and Communications Ministry told the state-run agency, "Instead of coordinating against terrorism, (Wikipedia) has become part of an information source which is running a smear campaign against Turkey in the international arena."

This shows a profound lack of understanding of how a basic site like Wikipedia works, which is either ignorant or malicious, and the latter sounds likely in this day and age.

i said decentralized, not distributed. decentralization has plenty of room for centers, the point is not to have just one. having specialized service providers is fine, the problems start to crop up when we don't have real choices. for natural monopolies, i'd argue that a cooperative model would work well.

Yes, this is the reality we now face. A generation of Internet idealists is still quite slow to realize what is happening, though.

You are too dismissive of the very real problem of fake news. It is another form of censorship. When millions of people are led to believe incorrect information it is just as effective as banning the correct information.

I'm a canuck who has worked with Turks and has visited Turkey. They're a wonderful people from a beautiful country with a real problem of a person in power. Turkey is almost entirely Muslim, yet they produce alcohol and tolerate its consumption within their borders, even by their own people. Let that fact sink in for a moment. Erdogan is subverting the premier secular democracy of the Islamic world, but nobody seems to care.

Turkey is nothing like the common stereotypes we have of it in the West, but Erdogan is a guy who, I think, wants to change that. A wonderful human being who I've had the privilege of knowing is currently in prison in Turkey on absolutely baseless accusations[1]. Nobody in Canada gives a damn because he was an "Imam", and that's a scary word apparently.

People in the West need to wake up and do their due diligence on Erdogan's regime. There's some seriously scary stuff happening because of this guy.

[1]http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/davud-hanci-turkey-cou...

Plenty of people care, but what are we supposed to do about it? Here in Europe Erdogan makes the headlines from time to time, right before the referendum he made several speeches where he called the politicians of multiple countries "descendants of nazis" and similar. Everybody knows that he cares more about suppressing the Kurds than ISIS. He holds Europe hostage by threatening to release large amounts of refugees into Europe, not dissimilar to what Qaddafi did. We've been hearing about the increasing religiosity pretty much since he took office.

It's one more example of a common pattern where the rural and the urban population disagrees, due to globalization, increased liberal ideas in cities, and a switch from manufacturing to service jobs. It seems to be universal that the rural population is more religious, less prepared for a global economy, and in general more backwards, yearning for times that aren't here anymore.

I think we should stop communicating from the top. Many problems right now are because heads of state, not necessarily people. Erdogan, Putin ...

We should try to get real people to talk, about who they are, what they want (peace ? surely .. war ? not so sure). So peoples in every nation start to avoid the national/patriot filter when thinking and voting.

Real people rarely want war, they all want the same basic things: food and shelter, a good future for their kids, and to live in peace. This is universal over the whole world, unless they've had their minds poisoned by leaders with their own agendas, be it political or religious.

However, most people also don't really care that much about other people, especially in other countries. So they elect people to handle that for them, and then believe what they're told. Mark Twain's quote "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness" seems fitting. With modern tech you can communicate with people all over the world without traveling (I'm in my underwear in Sweden right now for instance), which helps widening the gap between the "liberal elite" and the rest who feel left behind or that their country is taken away from them.

One thing that contradicts that in a way is the fact that a majority of the expat Turks living in Europe voted for the new referendum giving Erdogan much more power. More than 63% voted yes in Germany for instance.

I have a lot to say to and ask you, but right now I'll say you're right.

Nobody wants war, but in most context people don't feel the need to handle their lives either. Democracy re-emerges after wars because the people felt hard and had to suffer and wake up, so now it's obvious and easier to act for peace and democracy.

Seems like societies just have a MTBF of 50 years and after that war acts as a reset button.

ps: travel quote is neat

> More than 63% voted yes in Germany for instance.

I also was baffled about the results of the Turkish vote abroad. How is it possible that, in many EU states, they won which such a majority? I would have expected expats to be generally more liberal/globalist/progressive.

>With modern tech you can communicate with people all over the world without traveling

Internet used to be a tool that enabled people all over the world to communicate. I wouldn't have spoken a word in English if it wasn't for internet.

Commercialization of the Web killed the globalization spirit of the internet.

There's no commercial value in connecting people who are in different markets.

A Web enterprise does not benefit by showing its customers that they might be holding the wrong opinion.

Echo chambers bring loyal customers.

Globalization dies a little bit every time a curious teenager sees an error saying: "this content is not available in your country".

You are not an average internet user if you talk to the people on a different cohort, you are an elite and elites have always been communicating with the elites.

Uhh, I'm not so sure. Look at all the people on here essentially clamoring for war with Russia over.. uhm, Russia supposedly releasing authentic emails showing their favorite party (TM) to be corrupt? I might have missed some details in all the cold war fervor.

This is putting your head in the sand. The problem is the people, the voters, who put Putin and Erdogan in office and kept voting for more autocracy instead of democracy. Those presidents are just manifestations, symptoms.

There's always going to be a candidate like that to vote for, and democracy can only survive as long as voters prefer candidates who uphold democracy.

Not necessarily.

Both Putin and Erdogan (many others as well, Orban, Gruevski, to name a few), were elected under promises to bring prosperity through democracy.

Carefully targeting vulnerable groups with PR and economic engineering has proven itself a great tactic for achieving their autocratic vision.

edit: spelling.

Erdogan was democratically elected. He's not a dictator (even if he does act as one at this point) and judging from the referendum results, at least half of Turks seem to like his direction. It's easy to say those voters are uneducated or misguided but the fact is that this is how democracy works. Where I am going with this is that we should not blame just the leader but also the people who put him there.

Blaming misguided voters only has merit when freedom of the press is available and people have access to news that does not have significant pro-government bias. Turkey was ranked #155 out of #180 evaluated countries on this year's RSF list [1]. If the government controls the information that the people have access to, it is a little difficult to expect a legitimate democracy, which requires more than simply valid elections.

[1]: https://rsf.org/en/ranking_table

Democracy, just like any tool, can be manipulated and corrupted to serve one's own ends. This is how tyrants come to power: they use populism and nationalism to get elected, then slowly dismantle the very institutions that make up democracy until they are the only one in charge.

> this is how democracy works

No, that's a common misconception.

Democracy isn't characterised only by the vote, but also by liberal values. We call it liberal democracy.

I'm from Romania btw and until 1989 we've had communism / stalinism. Guess what - we had votes then too. It was all arranged of course, party members didn't dare going against the dictators, everybody was dancing on the same music, etc.

In other words, everything is up for vote except for the liberal values that make democracy work. Without those liberal values, you don't have a democracy.

And to put this in perspective: you cannot claim that a popular vote is legit without freedom of speech, because in that case people can be coerced or manipulated by those in power, without the opposition being able to fight back at all. How many people has Erdogan imprisoned? You also cannot attest the legitimacy of the vote when you don't have separation of power in the state, because you no longer have a functioning judicial branch.

All famous autocrats in history achieved power through popular support.

But here's where it actually hurts: it's easy to vote an autocrat into power, it's hard to vote him out.

Turkey's economy will suffer, tourism is already going down the drain, other countries will slow down trade with Turkey due to political instability. Erdogan, like all populists before him, will end up pushing more and more nationalistic messages, blaming the Occident for his own fuckups, threatening with conflict because that's what populists do when they lose support.

Either way, I'm fairly confident at this point to say that Turkey is no longer a democracy.

You can be democratically elected and later become a dictator. That's been the path of many dictators.

It's not uncommon for dictators to be elected. That's how the transition from democracy to dictatorship works. But I agree with your assessment of the problem: there isn't really anything outsiders can do when an electorate tries to hurt itself. Any appeals to reason will just be catalyzed into even more votes by "them against us" rhetorics.

Neither is Putin, yet he controls all the press. He's just an elected gang leader. Have something against the gang in power? You might just get shot on a bridge while going to work, imprisoned on account of fiscal fraud, poisoned with Polonium in your tea etc. That is how the Russian mafia works.

Imagine the Turkish coup was organized and executed properly and they succeeded.

Who takes power? Does it create a vacuum? A civil war? I often ponder these "alternate history timelines" and try to imagine what the world might be like.

Turkey has had several coups. So I'd look at what happened after the previous ones.

Well... It was properly executed and it has succeeded in giving Erdogan more power.

I agree with you that we should stop communicating from the top - and this is what some politicians tried to do (at least what some European politicians did, like the Dutch ones before the elections, when things escalated).

However, for business interests, you simply can't ditch a country like Turkey[1]. Let's not forget that Bush's grandfather was also funding Nazi [2] (I would like to focus primarily on the years before Americans joined WW2, basically, before they "knew" that Nazis were not yet official enemies) and he earned a lot of money out of it.

Nowadays, a lot of companies do the same. And it will always be like this, unless such a country is recognized as an official "enemy" of the state, and you can't do business there.

So, we have already 1 reason that you simply can't stop communicating from the top.

Then, you have one more reason: immigrants.

Europe has a bunch of Turkish people which, it seems, helped a lot during the elections - in some cases (Holland, Austria, and Germany) the "YES" to the referendum got more than 60% (in some cases 68%). This opens up a whole new bunch of questions we should ask ourselves (and people actually do, at least in Europe):

- Why?

- Why did these people vote for YES?

- Don't these people value the freedom they have here (which they do have, unlike in the US - sorry guys, that's how we perceive it in Europe - where racism is much more common)?

Questions which raise another question:

- What did we as Europe (or West?) do wrong?

This is somehow connected to your sentence:

> We should try to get real people to talk, about who they are, what they want (peace ? surely .. war ? not so sure). So peoples in every nation start to avoid the national/patriot filter when thinking and voting.

In my opinion there are too many things we did wrong and failed to do.

One thing is to have expectations. In Europe, I can tell you that before the Turkish referendum there were a lot of people, mostly reporters and journalists, going out asking such "pro-YES" voters (they were grouping together for propaganda or for any other reason) whether they actually were aware of what Erdogan wanted to achieve with this referendum. Obviously, nobody actually knew all the points in it. The journalist was mentioning each point, and their faces were like "uh?", while, of course, some of them were bitten by the strong cognitive dissonance: "no, but this is what media here say...", or "no, but it's not as bad as it seems".

This issue dates back to the beginning of immigration. People with low education came, and many of them simply didn't get further - meaning, 2nd, 3rd generations still striving to make it, or criminals, or simply living off of social money. Where can this lead to? Entire neighborhoods not accessible to the police, criminality rate super high, etc. People who cannot even talk the national language - forced, therefore, to watch their own news.

Another issue: double citizenship. What is that? You live here, but you still have a voice in your country. Sorry, but no. After X years, as an immigrant you get citizenship from the country you live/pay taxes in. Further, you are born in this country, eventually (in some countries when you are 18) you get this country's citizenship. That's it. Either that, or the old one. Both? No.

There is a sentence from a German author, Max Frisch, "We wanted a labour force, but human beings came" [3], which kind of explains what had really happened. And now? That's what we have. A huge mess, people creating parallel societies, and Erdogan that comes to Europe as a good politician to the majority of his people.

Why good politician? Well, want it or not, it seems that during Erdogan's administration, Turkey's economy got better. [4]

Does this justify the fact that this politician needs a crown and absolute power?

[1]: http://aa.com.tr/en/europe/german-companies-investing-in-tur... [2]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworl... [3]: http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/735/3/the-end-of-mu... [4]: https://www.quora.com/Turkey-country-What-is-the-story-behin...

It seems you are talking about Germany. Please name one neighbourhood in Germany "not accessible to the police".

thats what the un is partly about.

> I think we should stop communicating from the top. Many problems right now are because heads of state, not necessarily people.

Damn right. If the people in charge could stop trying to exercise power and just leave everybody alone, we'd all be much better off.

I think its easy to make the mistake that replacing the guy at the top solves the problem. Isn't there enough history to suggest that is not how things work? Trump could have a heart attack tomorrow but his fan club is still going to be around. They will just prop someone else up. Same goes for Ergodan. This is not a problem that gets solved by dropping a bomb or making a kill list or a wikileak or a tahrir square or a Jon Oliver skit. Unfortunately the current instant gratification generation produced and conditioned by silicon valley is in total delusion when it comes to this fact. This is a multi generational problem and we could be working towards a solution if we weren't wasting our time with all the above "well intentioned", "quick fix" distractions.

Yes and no. There were wannabe dictators in turkey before erdogan, but the army had removed them, which is why erdogan essentially neutered the army (in multiple ways and through quite a few years) to allow him his current level of control.

Turkey didn't change as much as they guy in charge was persistent, smart and popular enough to do things his predecessors didn't.

It is possible a different ruler would have done the same, but it is also possible that without Erdogan, turkey would still be democratic.

> He holds Europe hostage by threatening to release large amounts of refugees into Europe

This is one of the key facts of the situation.

Logically then, if the Syria disaster is solved, Erdogan loses a lot of his power. Or in other words, the crackdown of Turkey is part of the Syria conflict.

> what are we supposed to do about it?

Kick Turkey out of NATO first. If things get worse, impose sanctions.

He's holding millions of Syrian refugees and has threatened to send them to Europe if things don't go his way. Think European nationalism is bad now? You might not have a NATO after that.

We should refuse to be blackmailed by him. If he is that bad, those refugees are in danger in his hands. Europe has several rich countries that can easily handle the amount of refugees held hostage in Turkey.

Nope, US needs more Turkey, not less. Erdogan is democratically elected leader, and yes, he is changing and breaking things, but he is still ELECTED.

Turkey is going through transformation, and it will come out of it stronger and mostly becoming pillar of Middle East. In an already chaotic part of the world, pushing Turkey to brink to satiate your "bleeding heart" will cause more death and destruction not less.

What is strong about that massive paranoia this guy and his corrupt gang is displaying for months now? And how the hell do you get the idea that this behavior is something that would be accepted anywhere in the 21st century?

FYI: in democratic elections, you don't put the opposition in jail first and control the media in a way that the ones you've left don't even get a chance to reach the population or tell them in a honest way what is currently happening. I'm sure all those vote manipulations are also part of democratic elections in your eyes eh?

>Turkey is going through transformation, and it will come out of it stronger and mostly becoming pillar of Middle East.

Like Nazi Germany grew stronger and stronger and grew to be the leader of Europe (+)?

((+) until it was vanquished of course by democratic countries -- but where do you find democratic countries, when you need one?)

Isn't this the same argument for leaving Assad alone in Syria?

> he made several speeches where he called the politicians of multiple countries "descendants of nazis"

Whoever cries wolf is a wolf himself.

I think a major issue with Turkey is that there is a large non-secular voting bloc. Historically, that has been kept in check by periodic coupes by the Kemalist military. However, Erdogan has succeeded in taming the military (as demonstrated vividly by the failed coupe). Thus, the non-secular voting bloc has escaped the historic check. I am afraid, Turkey will become less secular in the next few years. In addition, there is not much we can do externally, as evidenced by the latest referendum, Erdogan has the support of a majority of voters.

Well it seems the majority is not that big. He won by a small margin, while controlling all the media. If it had been a true free election, I bet he would have lost this referendum. And if you look at the demographics, people in cities voted against, countryside pro. Turkish people living abroad voted pro Erdogan. I bet most of those people came from the countryside in Turkey.

> while controlling all the media

It's much, much more than that. Every single billboard and half the TV ads before referendum were ads telling people to vote "yes".

People didn't even know what they were voting for.

People trust him. He provides "Stong and Stable Leadership", he's built roads and delivered on his promises.

He then says "I need you to vote for this to give me extraordinary powers", and people trust him - especially as the opposition is in disarray

Hopefully people will see this for what it is and not vote Tory on June 8th.

Win with 75% and everyone knows you cheated. With 51%, you leave just enough doubt for it but to be obvious.

Bingo! It also seems that the quantity of secular bloc is lesser than that of the non-secular bloc. Apart from the military, Erdogan has also tamed the judicial system.

The majority of rural voters anyway. In the latest voting he had low support in major centres. His control of the media is key to controlling the public vote, especially in rural areas. So supporting the free press, and anti-censorship technology, is a great way to support democracy in Turkey.

He does not. He falsified votes.

>People in the West need to wake up and do their due diligence on Erdogan's regime

I think people in the West who follow these things pretty much uniformly dislike Erdogan and his throwing the journalists in jail type activities but the Turks vote for him. I'm not sure what we're supposed to do about it.

> but the Turks vote for him. "Vote". I'm not quite sure about Turks, but in Russia "vote" is a fake. As Stalin once said "It's not about who votes, it's all about who counts the votes".

There were always way too many violations in the vote process. e.g. people who voted multiple times, militaries who were forced to vote in the right way. God damn it, even 146% of a votes sum translated on federal TV channels [1]. Nobody even tries to hide violations anymore.

A lot of people simply don't believe there is anything they can do about it. They just wait the people in charge will be gone.

Plus add massive brainwashing, threatenings like "without <put the name> the country will fall into chaos", active opposition mortification by government.

And here we are.

[1]: http://netbespredelu.ru/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/656886.jp...

Much of the urban population rose up in support of Erdogan during the attempted coup.

And I agree with the brainwashing, we have that in the uk right now

The urban population rose up in support of democracy, not Erdogan.

> Turkey is nothing like the common stereotypes we have of it in the West

From what I see, there are two Turkeys - the liberal Turkey which resides in cities like Izmir and the conservative ones which come from places like Bursa or Gaziantep. Currently, there are fewer liberal Turks than the conservative ones.

> People in the West need to wake up and do their due diligence on Erdogan's regime

On this point, I've always found it amazing how most of my American friends/colleagues have little idea about what's happening outside the USA. I get that most news is local and all that but sometimes there are impactful events around the world which would be difficult to miss. Most times, they haven't even heard about the event let alone know about it.

I don't understand why Altay's comment is dead. I found it interestingly and informative. Unpopular opinions reasonably expressed should not be killed.

Check the user's comment history. It's not that comment in particular. The whole account is blocked for wishing people dead, calling people scum, insulting other users and expressing sadness that a genocide program ended to early. There's unpopular opinions and there's crossing the line.

It's not that we don't care, it's just we have our own problems, have you been following what's going on here?

Seriously, stop trying to spread that notion that EU has to take care of everyone's problems. It doesn't!

If the majority of Turks are brainwashed enough to support a dictator, mass incarceration and ties of their government to terrorist organisations in order to appease their xenophoby towards the Kurdish minority, then make sure it's their problem and not the EU.

The only thing EU must do is make sure it doesn't blow up their way. When (not if) Turkey starts their civil war, just make sure you don't allow them in the EU after they willingly destroyed their own country after decades of EU trying to help them solve their internal problems by increasing democratic institutions there (and pouring a lot of money), but they very stubbornly resisting it and actually going the opposite way.

The world must stop looking at EU like they are the fireman of the world and at fault for all the arsonists the population keeps electing in Africa, the Middle East and even some parts of Eastern Europe.

You are describing the more modern half of Turkey aka the vacation belt.

The other half is much worse than what most western people who are familiar with the Turkish resorts imagine.

It's like looking at SF or SV and extrapolating from it the mindset of the Bible Belt.

Erdogan has support of at least half of the Turkish population and in many ways when compared to the more extreme mindset of it he's a moderate.

The voters elected and support an autocratic leader, however wonderful people they may be. It's not just about Erdogan.

Turkey has a very harsh rural/cosmopolitan split, just like the US has.

On top of that, the last election (the turn the President into Sultan) had massive fraud and any critical media has been jailed.

Reposting my comment from another place here, as it kinda applies to this too, especially the second sentence:

> Every single billboard and half the TV ads before referendum were ads telling people to vote "yes".

> People didn't even know what they were voting for.

absolutely true! Which says a lot about those people who voted for him.

But they voted him many times before, it was apparent where he was heading.

I'm a greek who's grandmother has a view of Turkey within their back yard.

I'd say the majority of your view is true, but in my guess-timation, about half of them are fundamentalists, who still treat Kurds like third-class citizens, who want to turn Hagia Sophia, a cultural epicenter and museum back into a Mosque, who helped vote Ergodan in in the first place. The people you are talking about never wanted him.

A funny parallel, if you read HN, you could draw the same conclusion about America -- it sounds like most everyone is against Trump and are reasonable people, but 48.5% of the country still voted him in, and of that 48.5% half think he's doing a 'wonderful job'

These people don't stay in power by chance. America -- take note.

Isn't it kinda undemocratic for "the West" to go in and overthrow an, ironically enough, democratically elected dictator?

As someone living in Cyprus an island who has serious issues with Turkey, overthrowing Erdogan scares me more than Erdogan being a dictator.

At this point at least we know Erdogan's issues stay inside Turkey. If someone unsuccessfully tries to overthrow him no one can predict what his reaction will be. From invading Greece to a civil war that will end with hundreds of thousands dead.

If he is successfully overthrown, we'll have a new Iraq for a decade before the area stabilizes. Either way there's no clean solution.

It's also destabilizing. Look at Libya, Iraq, 1970s Iran, etc.

Ukraine is the only example where an autocrat was removed from power without the entire country falling into chaos. They were fortunate to lose control over just Crimea and the eastern zone.

I am not sure about truly democratically elected part, but if its truly democratically elected it should be fine with the rest of the world.

You do realize they voted him in? They specifically chose him to be his leader and continue to do so. Why should the West "wake up"? What do you propose the west does? Should we send the militaty and overthrow him?

In a referendum with tons of irregularities and many reports of government thugs intimidating voters.

Please give me a break, the great majority of the Turks living in Germany (just as an example) not only voted yes in the referendum but after it won there were major celebrations on the streets of a lot of big German cities by Turks living there.

Please stop this nonsense of trying to pretend it's always somebody else's fault other than the majority of the Turks. They choose to transform their country in the mess it became.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/referendum-in-tu...

In Germany sure, but not in most countries. http://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/map-turke...

Did you reply to the wrong post or something?

I play video games from a young Turkish woman. She goes to gigs, nightclubs, drinks and socialises. She hits on guys and they hit on her. She is indistinguishable from any western 20something. I was on a voice call with her the night of the supposed coup, and listened to her and her family angrily lemmenting the administration. It seemed even on the night of they knew something was fishy. She lives in Istanbul, and is educated, so maybe I don't get a full picture of the Turkish opinion. Maybe others elsewhere support the government and its actions, blindly. She'd love to move to the UK, and would fit in well with our culture. Yet a part of the Leave campaigns was about how Turkey would one day join the EU, and then we'd have Turkish people flooding here too!!! Shock horror. It's becoming a self fulfilling prophecy by the west at this point, to turn Turkey from what it is, to what they think it is.

As a Turk, I'm actually happy that we were told that we can't join at all due to the referendum results. Not for me, I see myself similar to the friend you talked about, with a western culture, wanting to get off but failing, but for Europe. Allowing the 51% to roam around Europe would seriously damage the level of culture and freedom you have reached.

Let me see if I can follow the logic.

There are people in turkey that are more western.

These people would leave turkey if possible, but they can't.

This is making turkey less western?

Wouldn't that have the opposite effect? The west is generally responsible for the brain drain in less successful countries. Throwing borders up will keep those people who share our views in those countries. It's a fair bet that those people will be the force for good change in their governments more likely within their country than outside it.

There is a 49% in Turkey, and then there is 51%.

51 won and this happened.

We need to introduce some sort of minority action in democracy. The smaller pluralities should not be powerless against the majority...

The problem there I suppose would be neutral arbitration. sigh

Most countries tend to have or quickly get rules to make constitutional changes hard to pass. E.g. requiring 2/3 majority or even multiple votes across multiple parliaments, or the like. Couple that with constitutions that limit the governments power, and you get some reasonable degree of protection of minorities.

The ability to enact drastic change with a minimal majority like in Turkey (or the UK...) is terribly dangerous.

That's a great thought - I believe this is how democracy in the US used to work with more magnanimity and cooperation. Maybe I'm romanticizing, but I will think on how I can do my part to bring it to fruition.

Or something like proportional representation, maybe?

51% won, but the vote rigging is staggering.

I'm Turk and living in Turkey and I can't name single positive thing about "that guy" or political islam in general.

> Turkey is almost entirely Muslim, yet they produce alcohol and tolerate its consumption within their borders, even by their own people. Let that fact sink in for a moment.

Call me naive, but is this actually a problem? I'm fairly secular and don't know much about how 'Muslim states' operate, but if they're producing alcohol, for it's population who drinks and and doesn't care, what is the actual problem here? Shouldn't the government reflect the values of the people (which has seemingly fine with alcohol consumption)?

The point is that there's no problem at all. The standard for many Islamic countries to introduce parts of Islamic law as state law, such as the forbidding of alcohol or the veiling of women. By contrast, Turkey is much more secular in its government.

I don't think it's that no one cares, it's that he is very difficult to stand up to. The EU needs him because Turkey is the only thing holding back a flood of 2 million refugees. They can't threaten sanctions without risking the floodgates being opened. The US has had a long relationship with Turkey and doesn't want to terminate it unless it has to. Turkey also has the second largest standing army in NATO and is a regional rival of Russia, which is convenient for us.

Yet so many people are rooting for Erdogan... to the point of fighting tanks bare hands. People say erdogan managed to improve some things and now people are all praising him madly...

1) There is a conservative majority in Turkey, which has flourished under Erdogan, both economically and societally. They have no reason to stop supporting them.

2) Not wanting a military coup does not make one a supporter of Erdogan.

But yeah, the secularist block seems to be powerless to do anything (and not even talking about the Kurds).

Aren't you oversimplifying things? Wasn't Erdogan democratically elected and later democratically increased?

There is nothing democratic about a election in a country where the ruling party has demonized the opposition in such a way that people are afraid to vote for them...

>People in the West need to wake up and do their due diligence on Erdogan's regime. There's some seriously scary stuff happening because of this guy.

I am wide awake but I am not one of the idiot Turks who voted for this guy. What am I supposed to do if a foreign nation turns itself into an islamofascist dictatorship?

FWIW, here is a map of US military bases in the region https://www.antiwar.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/1.-u...

This is a great map. However it doesn't include "minor" bases and classified installations, FWIW. It appears to be a map of unclassified bases with air operations capabilities, e.g. an unclassified base you could fly into and out of.

>> People in the West need to wake up and do their due diligence on [whatever] regime.

Yep, because that is what happened with the Eastern-Europian regimes in 1956 and 1969. History repeats itself.

It's this mode of thinking that tbh kills democracies, both internally and externally. The idea that just because you're struggling, your problems are someone else's problems.

We see it here (and elsewhere) with people continually calling for and hoping for politicians to "do the right thing" rather than organize themselves (unless it's to do something easy like stand around holding signs) and think through new reforms to then push for (we even have the article 5 mechanism designed explicitly for that); we see it elsewhere with "Where is the West, why isn't anyone helping" as they forget we have literally neither mandate nor motive to solve their problem for them, and problems of our own besides.

Yes, we will likely intervene on certain actions anyways to preclude all-out wars if they loom. But if it gets to that point it will only be insofar as it protects us or defuses that war; liberation and organization is still ultimately a people's own problem we literally have no business butting into.

In germany, we Germans know.

But as Merkel put it : erdogan is a democrat in a democracy.

Nothing we can do here.

I guess that's the thing: from what I can tell, Turkey ceased being a democracy with Erdogan. I do not believe anything pertaining to votes in Turkey for some time, since the time Erdogan was first elected. That vote was suspect, and so has everything that's happened since then.

In certain ways, what I find so disturbing about what's been happening in Turkey is how readily everyone seems to accept the official account of major events. The vote that initially established him, the "coup," the most recent vote... Things seem to be accepted at face value by the west without questioning it, even when major red flags are everywhere.

Erdogan isn't just a despot, he's a liar. And the West, especially Western journalism, seems to turn a blind eye.

Even if a large proportion of Turkey supports Erdogan, it doesn't mean a majority do. Even if Erdogan's government says a majority does, doesn't mean it actually does. And when a government establishes itself by subverting democratic or constitutional processes, it's not a democratic government anymore.

People care, like watching a child throw a tempter tantrum in a restaurant kind of care. Us in the core west know we can shut it down if it ever becomes convenient to, so its just amusing to watch.

> Turkey is almost entirely Muslim, yet they produce alcohol and tolerate its consumption within their borders, even by their own people. Let that fact sink in for a moment

I don't think this is something to be proud of. The US is majority Christian and they tolerate satanism

You seem to be implying that because they're Muslim but not really Islamic and very western that it's somehow not desirable for them to become more Islamic. How about you let them decide what's good for themselves? Why is it scary just because it's Islamic? I detect racist undertones in your post. And I don't think much of Erdogan at all, and how he thinks censorship is cool. But you don't get to start deciding what's good for a nation unless you're happy for others to decide what's good for Canada too.

As an atheist is it 'racist' for me to want a country to be "less Islamic". I certainly want countries to become "less Christian" - and generally less ideological, less superstitious, more rational and less socially conservative.

If that bundles up as "more Western" then so be it. These are the values I hold dear. I want more of the world to be liberal democracies and I an unhappy when a nation retreats from that.

Well, for starters they didn't decide for themselves. It was decided for them: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/18/world/europe/turkey-refer...

The greater issue though, is that it seems the "majority" is now imposing their religious ideals on a "minority". That is an unacceptable violation of the basic right to religious freedom.

Sadly Turkey is far from the first country in the Middle East to do this. There's a guy in Saudi Arabia on death row because he admitted to being atheist on his blog / social media.

Race != religion, and it is in no way unreasonable to judge people for following backwards religious doctrines that are a danger to the people themselves and their surroundings.

"I'm sorry, but we've decided you're not a cultural fit" is a reasonable response to Turkey wanting to join the EU in its current state IMO.

Islam is not a race, it's a religion, so he is not racist at all in his comment. You don't choose the color of your skin, but you have a choice which religion to follow, or not follow any.

I like that you think people living under dictators "decide for themselves".

Meanwhile, in the U.S., the administration is taking down government websites in an effort to bury climate data and scientific information. Useful to remember it's not just countries like China and Turkey that try to limit citizens' access to information.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...

Important caveat: the US government is reducing it's own efforts to combat climate change. That's not censorship.

Censorship is the suppression of undesirable information. Data on climate change is now being suppressed because it is undesirable to the POTUS.

The US Gov. has many branches and is not one consistent entity. The administration choosing the censor other branches is censorship.

A = A

I've read through a few definitions of the word "censorship", just now, and I don't think any of them make this particular distinction.

First Amendment law makes this distinction.

https://www.popehat.com/2017/01/25/quick-cheat-sheet-on-firs...

There is a distinction between open government and censorship. Not releasing information is different than banning people from sharing information. It's related, but definitely not the same as censorship.

>>Not releasing information is different than banning people from sharing information.

Lying by omission is still lying.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie#Lying_by_omission

The problem is this treats the government as a single entity with a uniform will: yes, if you do that, then the government is merely failing to act rather than deliberately censoring anything.

However the government isnt a single entity, it is many smaller kingdoms. And The King is censoring one of his princes internally: preventing the EPA from releasing data it would like to.

We're not a fucking monarchy. The entirety of the executive branch serves at the pleasure of the president.

And he's entirely within his rights to shut programs down; that isn't censorship. Learn your definitions lest you serve as a strawman for the other side of the argument.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents#English_W...

A data dump of all English Wikipedia articles as a torrent. In case you are not able to access that, here's the direct link: https://itorrents.org/torrent/6434C646E33D02F3CDCB9C15F9DF11...

On a side note, I think it's fantastic that we have the entire Wikipedia, possibly the greatest effort towards organizing the world's information, at our fingertips.

Further, there are good open-source solutions to read these dumps offline. For instance Kiwix http://www.kiwix.org/ which has a dedicated reader application but also an HTTP server (very useful if you want to run a local mirror), and Aard Dict on Android http://aarddict.org/

Thanks for those suggestions. I wasn't aware of Kiwix. It sounds similar to XOWA, which has worked well for me: http://xowa.org/

> On a side note, I think it's fantastic that we have the entire Wikipedia, possibly the greatest effort towards organizing the world's information, at our fingertips.

While I totally agree with this, on another side note, I think it's terrible that we have web censorship at our fingertips.

I might argue that Wikipedia is rather dangerous when viewed as objective. Wikipedia editors and the associated political infighting results in defacto censorship if your interpretation of facts doesn't follow the crowd.

I am not saying Wikipedia is bad -- but it is definitely not an unbiased source.

As suggested by others, it's a court order. Turkish officials demanded a few things from wikipedia. The main item was to remove all content where Turkey is shown supporting ISIS, but they didn't receive a response, and the repercussion was blocking access nationwide.

In case anyone doesn't know, Erdogan is enriching himself and his family by having Daesh/ISIS/Islamic state deliver oil to him at bargain prices and selling it, mostly within Turkey:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/wikileak...

(and Google for it, there is a lot of proof of this)

So let's stop pretending that this is done due to justice or even legal "right". This is being done to hide the crimes of the people in power. In this case, yes, crimes, specifically the government selectively applying the laws, corruption, and the like.

It is not being done for justice, to protect anyone's reputation from falsehoods, or ... it's just being done to hide crimes by the government.

I wasn't defending what happened, was rather reporting their reasoning for the curious. In Turkey justice has become synonymous with Erdogan's and his party's interests unfortunately.

They prey on the less educated, and banning a major source of knowledge seems like a very smart move by them.

Turkey isn't the only implicit supporter of ISIS though. ISIS exists at the pleasure and to serve the aims of a whole host of "Western friendly" nation states.

As a bonus, their terrible doings remind Americans of the need to stay engaged in a region that by some strange coincidence produces a lot of the worlds gas and oil.

To what degree is Erdogan's regime a problem of not enough democracy, as opposed to a fundamental problem with democracy itself? (Where democracy = 51% wins)

That definition of democracy, where the winner takes all, is from what I've heard a big problem in Turkey. I think a strong opposition and having several political parties in the parliament is the best way to avoid the tyranny of the masses, but the recent referendum in Turkey takes them in the exact opposite direction.

Democracy is not a method of protection for individual rights, on the contrary. Limited government is.

Madison discusses the issue in The Federalist Papers No. 10 [1].

[1] http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp

I'm assuming Tor circumvents the ban, correct? I'm going to tell all my Turkish friends to install Tor and signal, and be sad that Turkey has reached this point.

AFAIK, Tor is blockable because the list of relays is public, and accesses may invite scrutiny from the authorities. This is a dictator who's reportedly already imprisoned thousands of common people.

What I do is buy inexpensive server time from common providers in US or Europe, run a SOCKS tunnel over ssh to that server, and bypass blocks. It'll appear to be like any other SSH access.

If I need to post something to a website that should not be tracked back to my own address or my server address, I run tor daemon on the server and use it as a second SOCKS proxy to proxy the requests the server is forwarding.

I'm not in Turkey but I'm in a country that's taking an authoritarian turn and may become like Turkey in 5 to 10 years. Good idea to keep all the tools and know-how ready now, and start covering tracks early.

Reportedly ? Turkey has published exactly how many they arrested. The counter currently stands on over 100000 people that have at least been fired. At least 30000 have been arrested and imprisoned.

And Diyanet is back. If you don't know. The Ottoman empire, Turkey's predecessor, felt the need for iron control over mosques. So anyone who attempted to have mosque without "official curriculum", even a tiny personal one, in Ottoman territory would quickly find themselves arrested. And to drive home how serious they were: it is said that nobody got arrested twice for this. Nobody.

Now Erdogan is famous for directly threatening European leaders for not doing the same. Essentially, he demands to see European non-Diyanet mosques attacked if any Turk goes to them, and there are reports of kidnappings and disappearances (NOT in Turkey, in Europe).

Additionally a whole bunch of Islamic schools (Gulen-movement schools) have been closed and again there are threats against foreign governments not doing the same.

Censorship is the least part of this. Sad part is, much of Turkey appears to agree with these actions.

That's good, but it's way beyond the reach of the average user :/ It's terrible that the world is moving to that direction of complete censorship, but it doesn't look like there's much technologists can do. Politicians only do what people tolerate, and it looks like people will tolerate a lot of censorship for even the illusion of security...

Bad idea. Using Tor is probably the best way to attract extra scrutiny.

Not if one uses bridges with pluggable transports which helps making the Tor traffic look less like it's Tor (for example meek-amazon uses domain fronting https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek )

Not if a significant proportion of the population uses it.

Tor is blocked in Turkey, as well as some VPNs.

https://turkeyblocks.org/2016/12/18/tor-blocked-in-turkey-vp...

There are some ways to circumvent the ban, for now.

https://tor.stackexchange.com/a/13432

Much of this problem comes not from the top, but from the bottom. It's a terrible idea that people can actually suck, and suck en masse, but it truly is the case. The bad leader is an emergent consequent of the bad people crying for him. Shitty leaders aren't the sole purview of Islamic states, but they seem to be better at generating them than anyone else in recent history.

How do you fix millions of people, so they stop desiring terrible things? Well, by having a culture that pays better, and marketing it well. And it's delicate, because their "better" detector isn't working properly already.

What triggered this?

Usually Turkish government blocks sites right after a terrorist attack or in the case of the coup attempt. Is something about to happen?

Maybe someone visited a page on him/her self, did not like it, and decided to to something about it.

Good thing: many people use this service so they now know even better what kind of govt they live under.

I'd say it is just some random court order, maybe somebody edited page of Erdoğan to add some insults, which gave ideas to some judge to get government reputation.

This, maybe?

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Recep_Tayyip_Erdo...

Are torrents being blocked? What about Kwix and a torrent of Wikipedia?

http://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Main_Page http://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages

Isn't one of the requirements of being in NATO a democracy?

With moves like this from Turkey, what will happen to the NATO membership?

There is some irony in Erdogan's desire for EU membership, last decade, creating such a primacy of elected leaders (at the EU's behest and guidance) that the previous guardians of Turkey's secular heritage, the military, is no longer able to stage a coup against the emerging despot.

I'm seeing a lot of comments about this structure vs. that structure, but to paraphrase an old Sufi proverb someone told me, it doesn't matter what the cup is made of (gold? wood?), it matters what's in the cup (good water?). It doesn't matter what your government or family structures look like if they aren't able to facilitate healthy individuals and groups. If they are facilitating the health of some and the detriment of others, well then they are wittingly or unwittingly engaging in selection. It doesn't matter if she's your wife or your girlfriend. Is it toxic or growing?

Before Erdogan, Turkey had no middle class. You either lived in remote villages and lacked education OR you were "rich" thanks to high level of nepotism. Well, Erdogan changed all this, he moved people to into cities and these people didn't forget and started to vote for him.

Before then, the Kemalist or secular people were very relaxed, they knew from history if some how they lost the government, military coup will restore power. Again, Erdogan changed this.

Even by anti-erdogan majority, Erdogan is seen as the only true politician in Turkey, he knows how to convince or play people/groups. Just ask Gulen Movement!

How come that all dictators have one thing in common?

They don't understand that the more you forbid certain things, the more people are willing to fight for it.

They should do exactly like in the West: give us the feeling we are free, while a few companies decide what we have to do, what we have to wear, what we have to eat :)

This way, your economy flourishes, you are not perceived as a dictator, and neighbor countries don't want to invade you because of human rights :D

I would understand blocking WikiLeaks but blocking Wikipedia is a whole level of cenorship. Turkish people should reconsider their freedom. I don't live there and I am not Turk so I can't make more comments not knowing what's really going on there. God bless.

I love the Turkish people and the rich cultural heritage of the country, but everything I hear about Erdogan is pretty scary. My only beef with the people of Turkey is I wish they'd take a leadership role into making peace with the Kurds.

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...

So, the question is: What can we do as a community? Come on guys. We have probably many of the smartest people on this planet reading this shit here right now.

What can we do? What could be a cool tool, solution, initiative? Ideas anybody?!

It seems it is forbidden for the Turks to get cultivated like other people in the world... We live in an era of lack of information (which is probably like all other eras)

Does anyone know which article in particular triggered this?

This person seems to have more information: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14225719

Turks which knows wikipedia, already know how to use a vpn. It's a ridiculous decision. Our ruling should find better solutions for such problems

What problems?

not quite sure about world politics, but it seems Turkey is backpedaling fast these days? Maybe one day they can license China's greatwall-firewall IP?

Any alternative ? mirrors ? slimmed torrent distribution ?

http://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content/tr

Kiwix is one. I'm currently torrenting Turkish and English wikis (https://s.ave.zone/d5a.png) and will be seeding for as much as I can.

I kindly as any person who currently resides in Turkey to do the same.

hn gets useless in threads like this. we badly need a collapse comment tree feature.

so much off topic flame wars when everyone should be setting up tor nodes.

>we badly need a collapse comment tree feature

It's been implemented for a while now. Do you have js disabled?

or maybe s/he just didn't notice the [-]

Oh, poor the students there.

This is idiocracy!

I'm pretty disappointed by some of the comments here. Because Turks voted him in that makes Erdogan's autocratic rule OK? There is no free press, hundreds of thousands that have had any association with opposition groups have been jailed, the referendum vote has been widely discredited as fraudulent. Hitler was voted into office too, I guess that just ended up being the German's problem? Democracy doesn't die without a majority of the population allowing it to, that doesn't make it right and that doesn't excuse some of the blase attitude I see here. You know you can care about something without wanting to go to war over it.

On a side note, Hitler was not elected into office but came in second in the election for "Reichskanzler". The NSDAP came out strongest party with 33,1%. Politicians at that time thought they could tame him if he becomes part of a coalition. They guessed wrong and he assumed full power.

If you play the Hitler card at least get it right.

Some further explanation:

In the Weimar Republic (the German state between the two worlds wars) the Reichskanzler (head of government) was not elected directly by the people. Instead, people voted for parties. The head of state was the President, and it was him who appointed the Reichskanzler.

In January 1933, President Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Reichskanzler of Germany.

> If you play the Hitler card at least get it right.

NPD is a German right wing party that was founded 1964 and is nothing like the NSDAP that you meant.

Fun fact: NPD was not forbidden in Germany due to too much involvement of the Verfassungsschutz (German secret service for everything inside Germany) - they paid so much money to informants on the extreme right that they managed to build solid structures in large parts of the country.

Consider if you will - a diffrent approach to infrastructure altogether. There are no cables, no centralized Servers - just wifi capable devices.

How does it route, i hear you asking? It routes by likelihood of connection to social plankton. Social plankton is every group your device ever connects to- and is constituted by those members of the group, which who can gather the most "Yes"-votes about theire prediction, of the behaviour of the group. Take a bus filled with people driving to work. They always constitute from slightly diffrent devices, but the time is always the same, the amount of devices is always the same- and there is always that one deciding device - belonging to the social plankton "transportation-company" without the plankton would never come together.

Now lets take the greatest possible counter example: A convention of bus drivers, riding on a bus to the first convention of its kind. They would debate alot, and agree upon it beeing a bus- but neither could secure a majority - which bus it is. None of the driving by social plankton - called houses and cars, is able to identify the bus of busses, thus a new social plankton class is created.

How does a adress in this add-hoc net look like? It consists of a Unique identifier, wrapped into layers of social plankton, sorted by likelihood. The social organism city is likely to know the social organism university within. The key ingredient is, that inner-plankton, can be encrypted and decrypted only after arrival at the outter plankton.

So this allows for -extremely slow, in extremely big burst- communication to happen. Without any IP-Provider or Infrastructure Controll authority having a hand on it.

Even better, it allows for Meta-Organisms to host services. Lets say, i have a shard of Wikipedia on my cellphone, and im part of the opt-in plankton "FreeSociety", any request to a wikipedia server, that bounces with no return off the web, could bounce back through the social organisms internal, until it reaches me, gets a package returned, and the web is down but the gate is up.

We've actually planned and developed some pieces of software to allow this, however the main issue is that unless a very big amount of people use it, it's not going to work. Even if I and my friend 1km away uses it, unless there are enough users between us that can relay our messages, it's not going to work.

So we gave up, knowing that 51% would see it as an act of terror or smth, and even if they didn't, they wouldn't use such software or hardware.

I believe you're on to something, and there is a technical solution here. (Mainly I believe that because it's something I've been saying for years <g>)

Here in the states, the NSA was allowed to view data on telephone calls 3 or 4 levels out from a terrorist. So, for instance, if a terrorist called A, and A called B, and B called C, and so on? The NSA could track C or D.

The argument against that is that it would cover something like 80 or 90% of the population.

Well, there you go. Assume one trillion connected devices and each device is accessible through a "path" of connected devices over 4 or 5 hops, with a percentage_success and average_network_lag time tracked for each path.

Add in a few GB of buffering and the requirement that every connected device use up 10-20% of its bandwidth on public, anonymous access, and you've got a mesh system that's decentralized.

The only other limit I'd add is probably some kind of rules to prevent DDOSing, say a 64Kb message size and a few other things like that.

It's just a math problem.

You are right there- but its not just a math problem. Once people would use it, the usual suspects would show up and start to warp this distributed web.

Despots would add sinks that suck in all messages, by pretending to be a known plankton/connection.

Also assume that traditional isps would first try to subvert it and then try to replace it by providing a similar walled in service - warning from the dangerous open source network.

The whole thing would have to be constructed in away like the TOR-Network, preventing the identification of sender and reciver before Arrival.

Finally i think the problem remains, that any sufficiently enough supressing regime, would force its citizens to uninstall such software.

There is never a technical solution, because technical solutions can be regulated, illegallized, require licensures, or so on.

People will not mind requiring a license for "thing X" (esp. when airwaves are involved), and will not run software that can get them thrown in jail.

Sociopolitical problems do not have a naiive tech solution. [0] People do not cease being people if you retreat further into technology.

[0] https://xkcd.com/793/

let's, a lot, address, control*, and a meshnet does not solve your fundamental problem [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14220269

TL;DR people will not act to maintain an "illegally unregulated" system that has consequences as soon as you give them a licensure-regulated "safe" consequence-free alternative, see radio wave regulation

TLTLDR: the monkeys with sticks do not magically disappear if you build a new box

Why can't there be some sort of peer-2-peer Wikipedia or in fact any database that keeps people from blocking it?

>People in the West need to wake up and do their due diligence on Erdogan's regime. There's some seriously scary stuff happening because of this guy.

Honest question, why should the west care about every single problem that happens anywhere in the world? Why should we spend billions in wars, shed lots of our own blood, etc? Haven't we had enough of that?

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14225760 and marked it off-topic.

We do not ask you to declare war, but politically censuring (not censoring) people who abuse their power would have a great effect.

Even if you don't do that, just don't support them: For example, it'd be great if trump didn't call erdogan after referendum to congratulate him.

I haven't seen a poll, but I suspect a large majority of folks here would say they think the congratulatory call was absurd, inappropriate, and worrisome. The entire rest of the national security establishment within the administration itself would agree. This is the kind of thing that even the President's supporters largely wish he wouldn't do. My point being, we (the people) don't support Erdogan, even if the person who is supposed to speak for us seems to.

Also, until very recently, strong censure of the Erdogan administration's creeping authoritarianism was our policy. It does not seem to have accomplished much.

"The West" is not exclusively the US. Plenty of countries pay attention to global politics without "spending billions of dollars fighting wars, shedding lots of their own blood", it's not fair to lump them in with us.

It is possible to care and act WITHOUT overcommitting. Or at least, it is for countries who do not have a schizophrenic model wherein both sides are pushing against each other as hard as they can and so overcommit to everything including an astronomical defense budget.

In the case of western Europe, we should care because we don't have internal OR external border controls, and Turkey is a neighboring country with a lot of refugees to dump on us.

I wish I understood why there isn't a move to reinstate border checks in the Schengen area.

It seems ludicrous to me to keep internal borders open when it is clear that the external borders have failed.

I wish I understood why there isn't a move to reinstate border checks in the Schengen area.

But there is a move. In fact, multiple countries have done so, although temporarily: https://euobserver.com/migration/130260

Thing is, border control isn't free; it may not be visible for many of us, but there are a lot of people reliant on the openness of our borders for their daily lives. Imagine having to pass a border check on your way to work - that'd be the reality for many EU citizens nowadays if you were to reintroduce country borders.

And would it really solve the problem? What if those migrants just came by boat anyway? What are we going to do, let'em drown?

All borders should be abolished. No human being has the right to tell any other human being where he can or can't go (with the exception of trespassing on private property, of course).

We can "care" yet not "shed lots of our own blood".

Military-intervention-yes-or-no is a completely inappropriate model for the relationship between any given western country and Turkey.

Human behavior isn't exclusive to one country or one point in time, so if you want to improve where we are going to be tomorrow, it helps to look at the past at one's own history, and all around, and to use this information to make better decisions.

You might see trends or evidence of causality, which may not necessarily happen, but might. Being aware of it can help you, and me, and all of us, to reason and to make the right choices.

For example, you may not believe that your president will become a dictator, but then you look at other countries, and realize that neither did their people, until they got a dictator. There's a lesson in there somewhere. It helps to be aware.

> Honest question, why should the west care about every single problem that happens anywhere in the world?

In this case, West being West Europe:

Because European Union decided to build a federal union which has freedom of movement inside, and no border controls on the outside. What happens in Turkey is directly impacting the security, safety and economy of all Europeans (except the British, who were lectured on their selfishness for not joining the Schengen area).

EU's border control was outsourced to Turkey. So, thank Jean-Claude Juncker, Barroso, Prodi, Santer.

> Because European Union decided to build a federal union which has freedom of movement inside, and no border controls on the outside

No border controls on the outside? Are you being hyperbolic or just misinformed? Of course there are border controls (their adequacy/efficiency is another matter).

Because there's a country with 70 million people on the brink of a civil war right on our doorstep?

Because "The West" includes Europe, which is rather close to Turkey geographically.

Until last year Turkey was in slow but ongoing negotiations to be a member of the European Union.

> Honest question, why should the west care about every single problem that happens anywhere in the world? Why should we spend billions in wars, shed lots of our own blood, etc? Haven't we had enough of that?

Because that exactly same attitude, especially by the UK and US led to the rise of Hitler and eventually the Holocaust.

Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat its mistakes.

"Because Hitler" can become the excuse for all kinds of nonsense though.

Witness the Iraq war.

Another North Korea?

There's a long long path before a country becomes "another North Korea". Turkey is currently at risk of becoming on par with some of the Gulf states or maybe a Central Asian republic.

Governments yield too much power, meanwhile citizens keep funding said governments with ridiculously high taxes.

Trying to fix governments is counterproductive, just need to decentralize things imho.

Decentralization just leads to non-agreed-upon authorities taking power.

There will always be a monkey or monkeys with bigger or more sticks than you, and you'll always have something they can use more of. Until such a time that you have nothing left and are just a blight on the land they could be using for something else.

There's a reason unorganized societies always collapse into trying to organize themselves.

You are conflating term "decentralized" with term "unorganized". Switzerland is both highly decentralized and highly organized.

> Governments yield too much power, meanwhile citizens keep funding said governments with ridiculously high taxes.

Good point. In my opinion, paying taxes is the most immoral thing a person can do.

> just need to decentralize things imho.

Just -- you say this as if it was easy but no one knows how to do this and whether it is possible at all. Just see how long decentralization lasted in the case of Bitcoin.

It's not possible. There will always be organization and hierarchy, whether or not it's under an egalitarian effort (gov't) or a libertarian one ("my gang has more guns than yours, give us money/food/your land")

People who call for dissolution of power do so because they feel powerless against a unified whole. They forget that powerlessness exists in a much stronger form without organization.

I suppose they're welcome to not learn their lesson and try and become the next Jim Jones, but the rest of us will just shrug and say "sad for them" as we continue the pursuit of better democracies and representative governments.

What do you mean by "decentralise"? Smaller-scope government at a local level? Anarcho-syndicalism?

I suspect many of the same issues would appear.

> What do you mean by "decentralise"? Smaller-scope government at a local level? Anarcho-syndicalism?

Yes.

> I suspect many of the same issues would appear.

Nope. When democracy is small enough, the leaders are very close to their voters. This changes everything. See small democratic countries, they do much better at being democratic! I think we can make it smaller, and have the democratic process at neighbourhood/village level. Then go up from there with committees filled with delegates from the local-democracies that are for a specific topic (hospitals in the region, roads, schools -- anything local-democracies want to collaborate with others upon). All taxation and voting should happen on the lowest level.

Anybody reading this, I'd take any suggestion about such social organisation / (a)political structures.

If the architecture of society is distributed, then these issues won't appear.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com