Twitter restricted in Turkey in aftermath of earthquake (opens in new tab)

So if our thing du jure wasn't misinformation, I'm sure they'd just claim they're using their powers to combat hate speech or whatever else is culturally okay. If there's really nothing available, there's always "we need to protect the children from predators who are trying to abuse this dire situation". In the end, it doesn't matter if you're in power. Your tribe will always be with you, no matter the reason you're giving, and the opposition will be silenced.

This has happened because 'western countries and social media companies ... normalise censorship re-branded [as] "fighting disinformation"'.

They've literally shown the rest of the world how to do this.

I mean...the day Musk took over Twitter, lots of comments here were calling for twitter.com to be kicked off the internet...

So Erdogan himself came into power after the 1999 Earthquake devastating the country and wrecking the economy, leading to early elections, leading to his party winning landslide election in 2002.

That earthquake was like nothing seen before, hitting the most industrialised and populous part of the country and they had to introduce new taxes like Luxury consumption tax to fix the damage and prepare so that this never happen again.

This luxury tax is applied pretty much on anything and that's why an iPhone 14 Pro cost 2300$ in Turkey(US price is 1000$). Turks also pay 2x to 5x the price of the price in EU or US on purchasing automobiles, so it's a big deal. They also have lot's of safeguards so people just don't buy from abroad, therefore everyone chips in.

Also, Erdogan's primary achievement is construction business. He made sure that the builders can build and profit hugely, they also destroyed a lot of nature in the process and fine tuned the economy to serve the construction sector through the years. Guess what was the first Covid measures Erdogan announced at the start of the pandemic? He announced credit facilities for purchasing homes, no joke.

Also, the new buildings were supposed to be built according to the new code which is quake resilient and it was one of the prime motivations of this construction based economy.

Fast forward 20 years and we were struck with another huge earthquake.

The initial response is very weak, in contrast to the 1999 quake because in that one the Turkish Army was summoned immediately but this time for some reason Erdogan doesn't request assistance from the army and the protocol allowing local governments requesting assistance was removed by Erdogan in the previous years.

A full day passes without anything to show as a response when people are sending selfies from under the rubble with their address, seeking help. Most places receive no help whatsoever and people go into a winter night under the rubble or on the streets without electricity, food or water.

Videos showing newly build homes collapsed, people find promotional materials claiming quake resistance and the new buildings are collapsing like the old ones

The luxury tax, AKA the earthquake tax collected wasn't used to be ready for the next quake. This was something widely known and criticised but now we have videos of newly built buildings collapsed. It materialised.

Anger builds up, Erdogan is no where to be seen and the ministers are giving ridiculous speeches about how everything is under control and use a language crafted for the upcoming elections.

Then Erdogan appears on the TVs giving the speech you can watch.

So yes, he fucked it up for about 20 years and fucked it up on the disaster night. He used to be huge critic of the way the politician he replaced handled the quake and he ended up doing exactly the same, even worse. If the irony has not set in yet, let me tell you that Turkey is in economical crisis for some years now and Erdogan is in a coalition with the guy who was in a coalition with the guy who he replaced. It's almost poetic.

It's an NGO that currently is crowdsourcing donations for the relief.

I don't understand what you're suggesting CIA agents are controlling. What is "them" in "they control them"?

The article you link to involves surveillance (rather than control) by the FBI (rather than CIA).

Turkey has not even accused Mossad of being involved in the failed coup d'etat.

edit: I legitimately have no idea why I am being downvoted. Can someone explain?

There's a man who gets warning that his village is about to be flooded and he gets a warning he needs to evacuate immediately. He says he places his trust in god and decides to wait for god's help. A while later a tractor comes by and asks him if wants a ride out of the village, he tells them he places his trust his god to rescue them and tells them goodbye. A while later a bunch of cow herders and asks if wants a walk out of the village, he tells them .. trust.. god. Now water begins to come into the village. He climbs to the top of a hillock. A while later a few people arrive in a boat and ask him if we wants a ride out of the village, he tells them .. trust .. god. A while later he dies and then complains to god about help not arriving. God asks what else but help was the warning, tractor, cow herders and boat were?

There's a joke in here that Twitter is how God wants to help.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Turkish_presidential_elec...

Erdogan famously remarked: "Democracy is like a train, he said; you get off once you have reached your destination"

"Democracy," in the sense that refers to the democratic systems of government in existence, is a bundle. Elections without free press, expression, freedom to organize and such... That's no longer "democracy" in that sense of the term.

[1] https://freedomhouse.org/country/turkey/freedom-world/2022

Also, don't fall to the expressions like, "Turkish here", "German there". These does not make anyone expert nor without bias.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MyNaymeIs

The funny thing is that through a bunch of funny historical accidents, the bird is literally named after the country, so we could just spell the birds türkiyes too.

1. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/6/2/un-registers-turkiye...

It's just another step in the trend of undoing Atatürk's reforms that has defined the current regime. To summarize a lot of history, the foundation of modern Turkey was a pretty massive upheaval. Atatürk (the first president of Turkey, and is viewed pretty similarly to the US's founding fathers) worked pretty damn hard to drag the country away from its Ottoman roots and towards being a Western, secular, country. Under the Ottomans, the head of church and head of state were the same person, under Atatürk, church and state were separated. Atatürk's government outright banned the wear of most religious garb in public, such as fez's and headscarves. Women were given full rights. The entire alphabet was changed from an Arabic script to a Latin one. And these are just the big ones I can pull off the top of my head.

Basically, imagine if George Washington had banned crucifixes from being displayed in public and switched the US's alphabet to Cyrillic.

It is impossible to overstate how radical these reforms were, and most were intended to bring Turkey closer to Europe both economically and culturally. The following 85 years of Turkey's history, up to the modern day, has been marked by tensions between those that generally like the reforms, and would like to see Turkey continue towards being a well-respected member of the West, and the conservative faction who want Turkey to backslide into an Islamic theocracy.

The name change is one of many postures Erdoğan has taken to distance himself from the former group, and amounts to a dog-whistle for the second.

TL;DR: It's whole fucking can of worms.

And those arrests didn’t really amount to anything, did they?

So yes, I’d say mission accomplished.

But I hope that in the coming years, western societies will investigate government actions during the Covid craze. That’s the advantage of Democratic societies, there is at least a chance that sh*t gets cleaned up.

That’s pretty much what journalist Carl Bernstein claimed in 1977, followed much later by historian Hugh Wilford in 2008.

Is not compared to being arrested and possibly jailed

Please stop buying from China.

In fact, in recent times Lithuania has been a force for good against China, I’d suggest seeking out their goods if applicable to your needs.

Mutual interests tend to keep things civilised

It’s the same with Russia. It has been overflowed with money from EU before and during the war, and stop buying Russian goods will only affect individuals not buying it (and perhaps local sellers, too).

This is plain lie. At the very best you could stop buying end consumer products made and shipped from China. Assuming that things mad in the West are free from Chinese components / materials is a delusion

Thousands of buildings collapsed killing lots of people inside them. Once the dead have been buried there will be calls for why nothing was done to improve the housing stock and in a de-facto dictatorship the buck stops with the dictator. Erdogan isn't going to be able to weasel his way out of this one without claiming another fake coup.

And that's before we get into the fact that for obvious reasons Turkey isn't able to handle the aftermath of this alone, and that makes Erdogan look weak. The fact that they are happy to switch off Twitter even though it is saving lives by allowing people to be found under the rubble is telling: even now the lives of the Turks matter less to the regime than their own image.

1) Starlink is available on the internationally recognised territory of Ukraine, with the support of the government of Ukraine. The unlawful presence of Russian troops in Ukrainian territory doesn't change any of this. Turkish authorities, conversely, have not authorised Starlink in Turkey (for obvious reasons - their terror at losing their power to censor).

2) Turkey is not a democracy, and to say Erdogan was elected by the people ignores his misuse of state power to suppress, harass, and imprison members of the opposition, his control of the media, his control of the judiciary, his vast corruption, and his meddling - both de jure and de facto - with Turkey's constitution and electoral law. No free election can happen under such circumstances. The trappings of voting do not make for a democracy.

You can't block Starlink signal, it ain't cable in the ground or in sea you can cut at your will.

You can be the "elected representative" of anything if you put everyone else in jail

Was he?

>>Starlink cannot override the decision of the elected executive. He needs approval for that.

Pretty sure he could given the service is in space and Turkey lacks the ability or even really legitimate authority to enforce rules in Low earth orbit.

Elon chooses not to because he has enough hot water with US Politicians than to open up that mess. I bet is more worried but US government reactions here than Turkey;s government

One country misplaces a few weather balloons, another has hundreds of overseas military bases and bombs pipelines. Yet it's the former that is a "global threat", because the latter says so. Eye roll.

Being able to say that the Earth's core stopped just like what happened in the movie makes the earthquake machine theory more plausible or something.

I also cited the wrong capital, so I was wrong. But I meant what I said!!

You need the database. It must scale and be reliable.

It must have proper UI.

People must be able to use it without prior learning.

Let's say you create a website from the scratch. You need to use some cloud database. You need to build a simple UI which will work with bad network. You have few hours to do that. You need not to go bankrupt because entire country suddenly will use your app.

Twitter is well known to everyone. Twitter has API which basically allows to use it as a simple database. Twitter is web scale and can handle the load. Twitter has solid battle tested website and apps. And everything is completely free.

IMO it's a unique proposition and nothing compares to it.

If you have enough time, you can build better specialized app, that's for sure.

[0] Prank with Former United States National Security Advisor John Bolton https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=895Y5G5E6g8

"An official Turkish estimate of 19 October 1999 placed the toll at 17,127 killed and 43,953 injured, but many sources suggest the actual figure may have been closer to 45,000 dead and a similar number injured.[6][7] Reports from September 1999 show that 120,000 poorly engineered houses were damaged beyond repair[15] and approximately 20,000 buildings collapsed, resulting in more than 250,000 people becoming homeless after the earthquake"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_%C4%B0zmit_earthquake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_natural_disasters_by_d...