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YouTube Proxy > YouTube Banned > Turkish Republic

As far as we are aware, Turkey first banned YouTube back in 2007 after it became a playground for mischief during an online flame war between Turks and Greeks. It's well known that there's no love lost between the Turkish and Greeks but an online war was fought in YouTube with videos claiming that Turkey's modern founding father, Kemal Ataturk was gay, countered by Turkish allegations that Greece was the birth place of homosexuality.

Turkey is very sensitive to criticism of Kemal Ataturk, who died in 1938, so much so that it is an offence to criticise Ataturk punishable by jail!

The rather solacious accusations about Ataturk's sexuality were too for the Turkish government and shortly after they appeared, the Turkish courts instructed the country's leading Telecom firm to ban access to YouTube. Turk Telcom complied so that visitors trying to access YouTube were shown a screen; “Access to this site has been denied by court order ! ...” with immediate effect.

Not all internet providers complied with the ban and of course YouTube was (and still is) accessible to users of YouTube proxies. The Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Erdogan, famously said; "I get in. You can do so as well." Alas our own YouTube proxy had only just gone online at that time and we don't know if we are mister Erdogan's favourite proxy browser, but even if we did we wouldn't tell!

The ban did raise questionmarks in the European Union who were concerned about freedom of speech issues in Turkey, who are currently applying for EU membership. However, the ruling AK party denied that they had implemented the ban or even approved of it, arguing that the ban was applied by the courts, over which they had no control. The problem for the European Union was that in 2008, there were some 1,800 sites blocked in Turkey and such censorship is an anathma to europeans.

In 2008, Google stepped into the fray announcing that they would co-operate with Turkish internet providers to block viewers from watching videos that were in violation of Turkish laws of decency videos that were likely to cause offence. Shortly afterward the blanket ban was lifted and normal service resumed.

Shortly afterwards though, the full ban was switched back on after a Turkish prosecutor decided that the compromise with Google wasn't acceptable because even the risk that a person might view offensive content was too high. The new ban also affected viewers in the Caucasus because many there relied on Internet services located in Turkey

As far as we aware, YouTube is still banned in Turkey but there are a number of solutions to circumvent this;

You can use a proxy, as discussed.

You can use an obscure browser (ie not Firefox, IE, Safari etc.) because the restrictions only seem to work on mainstream browsers

You can use your own DNS by editing your Windows Hosts file to include a direct reference to YouTube so that you don't have to look it up via your Internet service provider.

 

If you have any more information to share on the UK YouTube restrcitions, please feel free to contact us by email at marketing@tubeoxy.com.