Turkish Government Gets Personal with Takedowns

Lumen Staff on November 13, 2019

For a timely current events-related Lumen post, as President Trump meets with Turkish President Erdogan ( November 13, 2019) we wanted to call folks' attention to the intriguing fact that according to the notices in Lumen, President Erdogan has himself sent 27 different notices regarding the removal of content from Google and WordPress (Automattic). Most are within the last year or so, with the most recent having been sent November 4th, but the earliest is from 2016. Also interesting is that none are to Twitter, despite the more than several hundred Turkish-origin notices to Twitter in Lumen.

Erdogan's notices are court orders of one sort or another, but do seem to list him, specifically, as the plaintiff or requester.

Most of the notices appear to be for blogs, and at least one references a Google+ post. Some of the Google notices appear to contain some unusual URLS for removal, such as http://riowang.blogspot.com/2019/10/arabic-for-beginners.html However, clicking through reveals that while the post in question is indeed about "Arabic for Beginners" -- problems with transcribing and translating Arabic, an example used to illustrate the problems that can arise is a cartoon that is an ...unflattering portrayal of Erdogan.

Another notice contains many links, quite a few of them to more cartoons, but others to URLs with titles calling Mr. Erdogan a war criminal.

None of this is surprising, per se, either the existence of such material or Erdogan's desire to have it removed from online. But it does seem noteworthy, somehow, that rather than a local or even national court, the President of a NATO country is "personally" sending court-ordered takedowns to at least a few of the larger and more well-known OSPs. Perhaps some of our Turkish readers have more illuminating insights here.