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Turkey Blocks Discord (reuters.com) 47

Posted by BeauHD from the cut-off dept.
Turkey has blocked access to Discord after the messaging platform refused to share potentially illegal information with authorities. Reuters reports: Justice minister Yilmaz Tunc said an Ankara court decided to block access to Discord from Turkey due to sufficient suspicion that crimes of "child sexual abuse and obscenity" had been committed by some using the platform. The block comes after public outrage in Turkey caused by the murder of two women by a 19-year-old man in Istanbul this month. Content on social media showed Discord users subsequently praising the killing. Transport and infrastructure minister Abdulkadir Uraloglu said the nature of the Discord platform made it difficult for authorities to monitor and intervene when illegal or criminal content is shared.

"Security personnel cannot go through the content. We can only intervene when users complain to us about content shared there," he told reporters in parliament. "Since Discord refuses to share its own information, including IP addresses and content, with our security units, we were forced to block access." Russia also recently blocked Discord for violating Russian law, after previously fining the company for failing to remove banned content.
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Turkey Blocks Discord More

Turkey Blocks Discord

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  • Turkey blocks Discord (Score:4, Funny)

    by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Wednesday October 09, 2024 @07:56PM (#64852659) Journal
    American politicians jealous.

  • Funny (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Luckyo ( 1726890 ) on Wednesday October 09, 2024 @10:35PM (#64852847)

    For those who missed Russia's blocking of discord, that generated a lot of brouhaha in Russia.

    Specifically because Russian FPV and reconnaissance pilots were using Discord to stream their video directly to military headquarters across the country.

    Classic case of right hand having no idea what left hand is doing. Bonus points for all the "evil Telegram supports Russian efforts in Ukraine by allowing on Russian military" messaging, all while Discord was being used by Russian military to generate kill chains on Ukrainians.

    Here's a real question: how much about this block is about outrage, and how much is about Turks seeing the command and control potential of Discord and deciding that between Kurds, Syrian Arabs and Afghanis on their soil from all the conflicts around them they really don't need more plug and play modes of controlling terrorist activities in real time with free and functional live low latency video streaming?

    • Speculating here that countries know that social media can turn into negative influences on society on a large scale and the countries are looking for any 'crisis' to ban social media.

      And social media allows for the free flow of information and given a huge sample of readers, a few will come to conclusions that lead to new laws which are inconvenient for the top tier elite's money making off of government.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

        You're over a decade too late with this complaint. In the wake of Egypt's 2011 events and the follow-up where it was successfully stopped pretty much everyone went to Egypt to learn how they disconnected all the internet services that helped revolutionaries organize.

        At this point, this know-how is universal, but it's fairly extreme way of dealing with it. Current lessons are on how to suppress only a few key services. You can see efforts into it done from various perspectives, from PRC's Great Firewall, to

        • Most recently in Bangladesh [thedailystar.net]. It didn't work. We are quickly getting to the point where blocking internet is a way to turn people against a regime.

          • Isn't that exactly what happened in Egypt? People were sharing stuff about the revolution, showing their support but not acting. The internet was cut and then the only option they had left was to sit at home bored or to actually join the revolution.
            The government fell 3 days after the internet outage.

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

              You're thinking first and second revolution. First was a failure, and second military that controlled the access (being a state within the state in Egypt) and wanted Muslim Brotherhood gone, so they allowed it to fall. But then there was a third one, that one being aimed at army's candidate el-Sisi, and this time authorities were ready. It failed, in large part because of just how masterfully Egyptian authorities handled organizing being done on the internet.

              And after that, bureaucrats from all over the wor

  • It's Türkyie now, not Turkey. Discord didn't change it and now the Türkyians are pissed off.

  • Open source projects (Score:3)

    by OngelooflijkHaribo ( 7706194 ) on Thursday October 10, 2024 @02:44AM (#64853125)

    I hope this will maybe stop open source projects that preach all about how open they are on their pages to stop using it as their main forum of discourse and use something open instead. I always found that strange.

    • I just wish they would stop using it because it is trash. It doesn't work correctly at a fundamental level if you don't enable a ton of spying domains, so they have clearly made it actually dependent on that spying.

      • Well that's the thing with free software; it tends to be less trash because people can modify it to remove the trash.

        A free protocol requiring that would quickly be forked to not require it; so it would never require it in the first place.

        The issue with chat protocols and software and other social things is how easily they lock in. A good open standard does nothing if all one's friends aren't using it. People can use bad proprietary text editors all they want but I can till work on my own free one and what

  • When you block something that nearly everyone uses, then nearly everyone is a suspected criminal.

  • is one of the most common excuses used by authoritarians and zealots to carry out their mayhem.

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