YouTube access restored in Turkey Published duration 4 June 2014

image copyright AFP image caption The ban was imposed after leaked recordings of official meetings turned up on YouTube

Turkey has lifted its ban on YouTube, two months after blocking access to the video-sharing site.

The move comes after the country's highest court ordered authorities to restore access, saying the ban violated laws on freedom of expression.

The ban was imposed in late March, soon after recordings alleging official corruption were aired on the site.

Turkey passed a controversial law early this year that let regulators cut off any site without needing a court order.

The government had also imposed a ban on social networking site Twitter, but that was lifted last month.

Authorities had continued to block YouTube until now despite decisions from lower courts calling on the government to lift the ban.

The ruling by the constitutional court is widely seen as a snub to the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which has been a sharp critic of social media sites.

Both YouTube and Twitter were blocked after recordings of official meetings were leaked and widely circulated.

One recording involved senior army officers discussing intervention in Syria and others supposedly revealed corruption among people close to Mr Erdogan.

The block was imposed as a "precautionary administrative measure", Turkey's telecommunications regulator had said at the time.

YouTube was blocked previously in Turkey in 2007 but that ban was lifted in 2010.

The Turkish newspaper Millyet reported on Monday that another social network, Ask.fm, was blocked this week. It published a memo from the country's Department of Telecommunications confirming the move.

However, the Latvian-based site indicated that any such restriction might have been short-lived.

"Today Ask.fm service in Turkey is stable and continuous," Liva Biseniece, Ask.fm's director of external relations, told the BBC.

"The traffic from Turkey to the site is at its usual level. On Monday, however, it was apparent that traffic from Turkey was slightly decreased.

"As of now, the company has not received any information from Turkish authorities regarding a possible ban of Ask.fm."