UPDATE 1025 GMT: President Abdullah Gül has broken with Prime Minister Erdogan over the Twitter ban.
Gul wrote — appropriately, on his Twitter account — “I hope this ban will not last long. If there is a violation of privacy on Twitter, only the related pages should be blocked. The platform is impossible to block altogether. Such a ban is also unacceptable.”
Deputy Prime Minister Ali Babacan said on Friday that he expected the ban to be temporary: “I don’t think this will last too long. A mutual solution needs to be found.”
Babacan said while freedom of expression was important, the individual’s right to privacy also needed to be respected.
Turkish authorities blocked access to Twitter on Thursday night, hours after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan vowed to shut down the social media platform.
“We now have a court order. We’ll eradicate Twitter. I don’t care what the international community says. Everyone will witness the power of the Turkish Republic,” Erdoğan said at a campaign rally in western Turkey for local elections on March 30.
See Turkey Analysis: What’s Important About Erdogan ‘s Threat to Facebook & YouTube
The Press Advisory of the Prime Ministry later “clarified” Erdogan’s statement, saying that Twitter’s administrators ignore court orders to “remove some links” after complaints.
The Communication Technologies Institution (BTK), recently given extraordinary powers with an Internet law, listed three court rulings and one prosecutor’s decision as the reason for the suspension of the service.
Twitter can still be reached by circumventions of the blocks, such as DNS-tweaking and Virtual Private Networks.
Those steps, as well as access to Twitter on mobile devices, already appear to have broken the block on Twitter:
If Turkish govt doesn't remove the ban on Twitter, all they'll end up with is a Twitter without them. Everyone else is back.
— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) March 21, 2014
Last month, Erdoğan accused a “robot lobby” of targeting the Government through Twitter messages, as he denied the authenticity of recordings of phone calls between him and his son Bilal.
See Turkey Transcript & Analysis: PM Erdogan to Son “Move All the Money”
In the recordings, Erdoğan told his son to move millions in funds amid a wide-ranging corruption investigation that has imprisoned businessmen and sons of Cabinet ministers.
On March 6, Erdogan threatened to shut down Facebook and YouTube “if necessary” via the new Internet law.
YouTube has been repeatedly banned in Turkey in the past decade.
