The battle between YouTube and Turkish officials continued this week as Turkey reportedly unblocked and then re-blocked the Google-owned video site in the country over unflattering videos of the country’s political leaders.
Turkey re-instated a ban on YouTube this week, days after a 2.5-year ban was lifted last Saturday, according to a state-run news agency. On Tuesday night, a Turkish court banned YouTube again, this time over an old video purportedly showing former opposition leader Deniz Baykal in a hotel room with someone other than his wife. Baykal was forced to resign over the video in May, according to The Guardian.
Scott Rubin, Google’s head of public policy and communications strategy for EMEA, said the company was investigating the reported ban.
“As always, we are open to discussing with Turkish authorities any concerns they may have about our services. If there are videos that they-or anyone else-believe may violate our Community Guidelines, it’s easy to flag the video,” Rubin said.
“We review all flag[ged] videos quickly, and if we find they do break the rules, we remove them quickly,” Rubin continued. “A removal for a Community Guidelines violation is a global removal, quite different from the previous demand that we apply Turkish law outside the borders of Turkey, which, of course, we refused to do.”
Turkish authorities first imposed a ban on YouTube for two days in 2007 over four videos that were deemed insulting to Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Another ban was put into place in May 2008 over the same issue, which lasted for more than two years.
YouTube refused to remove the videos from its site but made them inaccessible to users in Turkey. “We refused because we do not believe that Turkish law can or should be applied outside Turkey,” Google said in a previous statement. Many Turkish people got around the ban via proxy Web sites.
A court in Ankara on Saturday lifted the ban after a German-based company reportedly used its technology to remove the videos from the site, Reuters said. YouTube later re-posted the videos. The Tuesday ban, imposed by another court in Ankara, related to the aforementioned video of Baykal, Reuters reported.
Turkish president Abdullah Gul condemned the YouTube ban on his Twitter page, The Guardian reported, saying he did not approve of the bans and had asked officials to examine legal ways of reopening access.
In June, Turkey inexplicably banned many Google IP addresses, mostly for apps like Google Translate, Google Books and Google Docs, the International Business Times reported.
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