34 ms·

Twitter restricted in Turkey in aftermath of earthquake

741 points by flixing 4y ago

flixing 4y ago
just incredible... That's one of the very few platforms where people organise help, and share locations of where help is needed.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
m000 4y ago
Elections are around the corner, and Erdogan's approval ratings have been dropping even before the earthquake. Just saying...
- MonkeyClub 4y ago
  Things might get even hairier given the elections and the popularity drop due to both politics and the earthquake. It’s possible that a state of emergency on account of the earthquake will postpone the elections.
  - ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
    In other countries the population will unite after natural disasters, and leadership is usually given credit for the response as long as they continue support for local response efforts set up in the immediate aftermath. Why would popularity of the leader drop so quickly due to an earthquake? It's been what 36 hours. At this point almost all committed resources will still be highly local...
    - actionfromafar 4y ago
      In autocratic regimes, the leaders get all the cred for things going well, but they also are seen as responsible if things crumble.
    - sgc 4y ago
      Potentially because they cut off social media essential to life-saving efforts, and focus on managing optics rather than providing concrete help? Just a stab in the dark, but who knows.
    - slt2021 4y ago
      because Erdogan's relatives were heavily involved in construction industry and these flopped buildings are result of Erdogan's family dealings
      - ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
        Thanks. That is an answer which makes sense.
    - netsharc 4y ago
      Well, either Erdogan knows he's deeply unpopular, so he/his lackeys has to censor all the bad news and criticism so he/they can look a bit better, or he's afraid he's deeply unpopular, which means a bit of self-awareness of what a raging asshole dictator but useless leader he is... Fun times! A leader that actually cares but is overwhelmed would probably not be afraid of admitting that, s/he could rally the population together to overcome the tragedy despite their lack of resources. I think Dubya managed to convey this with 9/11, no one really knew how bad decisions by his administration lead to the threat being unnoticed. Meanwhile with Erdogan, he's been the boss for many years, the public probably thinks: The government's not able to rescue people effectively? Well, that's because it's been a kleptocracy for a long time.
- PM_me_your_math 4y ago
  Elections are meaningless if you can print millions of untraceable mail-in ballots and do not enforce rigorous ID requirements. Furthermore, elections are even less meaningless if you can imprison the opposition or destroy them in media under false and contrived pretense.
  - roamerz 4y ago
    [flagged]
- throwawayccp 4y ago
  Religion is the Trump card in those countries
RobinUS2 4y ago
In the case of protests etc I'd understand the goal behind it from certain actors involved, but why in this case?
- jonasdegendt 4y ago
  I'm not up to date on how the Turkish government is handling this but I'm willing to bet it has something to do with how they're not doing a great job at proving aid to the affected region, and they're trying to contain that information to save face.
  - RobinUS2 4y ago
    Reading a bit it seems to be potentially that the recommendations after the last big quake haven't been followed up properly. So basically stronger building requirements, with government validation was the plan; in reality not done (properly) and "checked" by paid companies.
    - postingawayonhn 4y ago
      My first thought on seeing some of the images was that there must be some criminal negligence involved. There is one area with 20 or so similar looking apartment buildings (about 6 levels each) where every second one has completely pancaked. I was in Christchurch, New Zealand during the 2011 earthquakes. Only 2 major building completely collapsed. One had been designed by an engineer with insufficient qualifications and the other had design issues that were previously identified but never addressed.
      - baybal2 4y ago
        [dead]
    - scythe 4y ago
      It's worth noting in context that Erodgan is heavily involved in the Turkish real estate industry: https://www.duvarenglish.com/amp/president-erdogan-the-worlds-biggest-real-estate-agent-news-57329 https://www.duvarenglish.com/amp/president-erdogan-the-world...
lessname 4y ago
This is so sad because twitter is still mainly used by people to help each other, e.g. to tell where help is needed or who can help.
- philipov 4y ago
  With authoritarian regimes, having someone who's not a representative of the regime doing anything to help others is often seen as a threat to the authority of the government.
GalenErso 4y ago
[flagged]
- niij 4y ago
  Please keep comments like this on Reddit.
Darmody 4y ago
People asked Elon Musk on twitter to deploy Starlink to Turkey and he said he can't because it is not approved. I wonder why.
- Fellshard 4y ago
  Erdogan explicitly declined it when Musk offered.
  - anticensor 4y ago
    The main probable cause for it is that Starlink wanted to offer it unfiltered, as they normally do in all other cases of emergency relief coverage; but the Turkish government wanted the regular filtering.
- IG_Semmelweiss 4y ago
  There is a difference between war and executive priviledges. The former (Russia) unilaterally imposed a decision (war) on another government and its people. The latter (erdogan) is acting in his capacity as the elected representative of the people. Starlink cannot override the decision of the elected executive. He needs approval for that.
  - malfist 4y ago
    Approval from whom?
    - vinceguidry 4y ago
      The state. In the case of UA that was Zelensky. In Turkey it's Erdogan. HNer often seem to have this weird idea that companies can take governments head-on.
      - postingawayonhn 4y ago
        Depends on the countries involved. The US has backed SpaceX in enabling Starlink service in Iran.
middleclick 4y ago
[dead]
nemo44x 4y ago
What about "tooting"? Can they "toot" still?
- bronikowski 4y ago
  They could block big instances but have no chance of blocking smaller ones due the distributed nature. But the same goes for blogs, e-mails and other forms of information exchange. The problem is none of those have global audience like Twitter does, love it or hate it.
can16358p 4y ago
Turkish here. This is unbelievable, but totally expected from the current "democractic" government. Social media usage is very high in Türkiye and people are coordinating using social media (mainly Twitter) for rescue operations in near realtime. I'm pretty much sure some people will literally die under wreckage because of communication interruptions as the result of this block. (For anyone telling to use VPN, yeah, many people are used to using VPN because of these blocks which also happened in the past, but not everyone is tech savvy and it's not reliable for life-or-death situations.
- rayiner 4y ago
  When you use quotes around “Democratic” do you mean the elections are rigged? I’m not familiar with the legitimacy or lack thereof of Turkish elections.
  - anticensor 4y ago
    One incident even featured a pre-filled ballot indicating a vote for then-ruling parties.
    - gumby 4y ago
      Decades ago one of my profs described his voting experience in the USSR: they had a completely private (“Australian”) voting system where you picked up a ballot, entered a private voting booth, filled out the ballot, then deposited it in the urn. Or you could pick up a ballot pre-filled-in with the straight communist ticket to save time and just put it straight in the urn. Naturally anyone in the room could see which you chose. Perhaps more amusingly: he was an exchange student at the time (late 60s?). Because communism was a universal movement anyone could vote, so he thought, “well why not while I have the chance?”
  - can16358p 4y ago
    They are not elected democratically, and they are not deciding on anything democratically, even though it is "democratic" on paper.
  - 4y ago
mrtksn 4y ago
Erdogan's first speech was almost 2 days after the earthquake and he said "We are monitoring who said what on the social media and tried to provoke the people. Today it's not the day to go after those but we take notes and when the day comes, we will go after them". Just look at his face when delivering this speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doy38aKbMw4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doy38aKbMw4 It's like from V for Vendetta. The lighting choice is very particular. Twitter was heavily used to seek help by people in turmoil, even hundreds of people were posting from under the rubbles. The officials were claiming that everything was under control and they are helping everyone but people were posting videos showing the situation on the ground and the situation didn't look even close to being under control. The head of communications of Erdogan even introduced an app to streamline "reporting disinformation". Like, it's the second day after a massive earthquake and they published a f*king app to snitch people. Here is the announcement of the app, early at 05:00 local time in the morning 24 hours after the quake: https://twitter.com/fahrettinaltun/status/1622777204852592640/photo/1 https://twitter.com/fahrettinaltun/status/162277720485259264... Also there were many incidents of the mainstream media cutting of talks or turning away the camera when people said or did anything discrediting the official narrative. Yesterday, some people with prominent accounts who shared the tweets from the people in the region began reporting that they were taken into custody by the police. I guess the day has come quickly.
- golergka 4y ago
  This is one of many, many reasons why western countries and social media companies should not normalise censorship re-branded like "fighting disinformation".
  - luckylion 4y ago
    Not sure that would make a difference. Western societies have an issue with genocide, so Russia claims Ukraine was committing genocide against Russians. If Westerners didn't care about genocide, Russia would've claimed something else, Putin certainly has no issue with genocide. So if our thing du jure wasn't misinformation, I'm sure they'd just claim they're using their powers to combat hate speech or whatever else is culturally okay. If there's really nothing available, there's always "we need to protect the children from predators who are trying to abuse this dire situation". In the end, it doesn't matter if you're in power. Your tribe will always be with you, no matter the reason you're giving, and the opposition will be silenced.
bloaf 4y ago
There is/was an active disinformation campaign on Twitter attempting to link the earthquake to Türkiye denying Nato expansion. The ridiculous conspiracy theory is that the US used a HAARP system to cause the earthquake in retaliation. Not saying that's the reason for the ban, but twitter is not solely a force for good here.
- college_physics 4y ago
  Maybe the US used mind control to force (over several decades) Turkish contractors to build house-of-cards on top of a major tectonic plate fracture line? But indeed our comms/social channels are just a mess - that we pay for dearly when real suffering hits us. We knew that much from the pandemic already.
- PM_me_your_math 4y ago
  That's annoying. HAARP is essentially just a steerable RF beam that heats the ionosphere for RF propagation research, or can be used to bounce RF off of the moon. Neither have any effects on fault line stress or slippage that I am aware of. So herein lies the point of all this. People who know its bullshit, know its bullshit, and can tell other people (who don't know) that it is bullshit. It should not be up to any government or company to use force or coercion to meter any idea or speech unless it is, on the rarest of occasion, illegal. Our civilization is more connected than ever before. We have access to untold volumes of knowledge. Greater than any library in history. If he were alive today, Aristarchus of Samothrace, the 6th head librarian of the Library of Alexandria, would give his left nut for just 10 minutes on the internet. We built a vast and wonderful civilization that is almost to the star-faring stage, and we did it without government censors or censorship by ideologues. The very notion of some bureaucrat, state actor, or crybully mod deciding what you should think or read insults the collective intelligence and struggle for absolute truth from the last 2500 years of human history.
  - qbrass 4y ago
    A secret HAARP-like device that causes directed earthquakes was literally from the movie The Core. It use is what kicked off the plot. Being able to say that the Earth's core stopped just like what happened in the movie makes the earthquake machine theory more plausible or something.
remind_me_again 4y ago
[dead]
EGreg 4y ago
This is why we need an open source alternative that communities can use to self-organize and recover after disasters: https://qbix.com/blog/2019/03/08/how-qbix-platform-can-change-the-world/ https://qbix.com/blog/2019/03/08/how-qbix-platform-can-chang... The future of decentralization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzMm7-j7yIY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzMm7-j7yIY Otherwise all we have is outrage at governments and corporations, but they have all the power and all the software too.
zoobab 4y ago
Time for Nostr.
- rvz 4y ago
  Time for what?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Lord_Zero 4y ago
    Nostr.
  - throwaway69123 4y ago
    Nostrel
- Laaas 4y ago
  Nostr isn't decentralised. Why do you shill for it? It's not much better than Twitter.
Jun8 4y ago
Words fail me! This is a serious impediment to search & rescuer efforts as well as coordination for money and other donations. The pretext given for the closure was that Twitter owed money to the Turkish government. You can see the anger of locals where a mob reacts to Minister of Transportation’s visit: https://youtube.com/shorts/B7t9W7Qgpfs?feature=share https://youtube.com/shorts/B7t9W7Qgpfs?feature=share WhatsApp isage is ubiquitous in Turkey but it seems this morning people are seeing problems with that, too.
m0guz 4y ago
Insane. Developers are trying to make the best use of Twitter. * https://huggingface.co/deprem-ml https://huggingface.co/deprem-ml * https://deprem.io https://deprem.io * https://deprem.basarsoft.com.tr https://deprem.basarsoft.com.tr * https://go.ahb.app/guvenliharita https://go.ahb.app/guvenliharita * https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1QpICWDVpd3eIScSvajnMXg45YrTOS7A&ll=36.241283100536464%2C36.9957036773029&z=9 https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1QpICWDVpd3eIScSvaj... * https://depremenkaz.xyz https://depremenkaz.xyz Almost all the info listed on these websites coming from twitter.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- wmeredith 4y ago
  This is a tragedy, and it's great that people are trying to help in any way they can. However, building stuff on Twitter's platform seems like utter folly these days.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    Truthfully it was a bad idea when Jack Dorsey owned it too - now that Musk is in charge, it's a no-brainer.
  - vbezhenar 4y ago
    What's the alternative? You need the database. It must scale and be reliable. It must have proper UI. People must be able to use it without prior learning. Let's say you create a website from the scratch. You need to use some cloud database. You need to build a simple UI which will work with bad network. You have few hours to do that. You need not to go bankrupt because entire country suddenly will use your app. Twitter is well known to everyone. Twitter has API which basically allows to use it as a simple database. Twitter is web scale and can handle the load. Twitter has solid battle tested website and apps. And everything is completely free. IMO it's a unique proposition and nothing compares to it. If you have enough time, you can build better specialized app, that's for sure.
saiya-jin 4y ago
This is playbook of scumbag tyrants, doesn't matter if Putin, Erdogan or similar. I for sure hope EU politicians are taking a note too, there are 2 existential threats to democratic free Europe long term - Russia and Turkey. Both have same ambitions, are on completely opposite side of all crucial values free world holds dear. Luckily their competence severely lags behind their ambitions, to think Turkey was for some time considered to join EU... I think Ataturk would be heavily depressed if he witnessed present day Turkey and its leaders.
- coffeeblack 4y ago
  You are underestimating the threat that CCP China is, not just to Europe but to the entire world.
  - unityByFreedom 4y ago
    China's exit, as happened 70-80 years ago, would cause us to have to work more. That might not be such a bad thing, though I doubt it will happen to the same degree. It's still fresh in everyone's mind.
  - pphysch 4y ago
    No, you are just susceptible to "threat inflation". It's a very profitable industry in Washington. One country misplaces a few weather balloons, another has hundreds of overseas military bases and bombs pipelines. Yet it's the former that is a "global threat", because the latter says so. Eye roll.
    - ivalm 4y ago
      The former is also claiming that many territories it doesn’t hold are actually theirs and countries around the former are asking the latter to come help them defend in case of former’s attack.
- geysersam 4y ago
  Maybe if EU hadn't been so reluctant to let them in that would've put them on another path than the one they are going now.
halilb 4y ago
I live in Turkey and was very close to the earthquake epicenter. I can say that communication in affected cities is very limited and Twitter had a real positive effect on organizing help and reaching out to lots of people in the area. So blocking Twitter right now is pure evil. They are only interested in the optics and looking strong for the upcoming election and do not care about anything else. I saw some people waiting for their relatives to get rescued around collapsed buildings dare to say that they haven't received any official help so far in the news. And they said that "government can come and arrest me for saying this - so be it". I don't think the Turkish government is reading HN but still feeling a little bit anxious while posting this after witnessing so many weird things here.
- unityByFreedom 4y ago
  It's a tragedy no nation should face alone. There should be no "looking bad" here, just opportunities to help. Why not embrace that and do whatever you can? Any city would face horrible losses in this situation. Heck, Miami lost half a building on a normal day...
  - foronetimeonly1 4y ago
    [dead]
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  Do you think it will actually harm Erdogan's support though, anger over blocking twitter?
  - widowlark 4y ago
    Is his popular support relevant when he has his hands on the levers of government operations?
    - jrochkind1 4y ago
      > Anger Over Quake Response Challenges Erdogan Ahead of Election > A furor is building among some survivors over the government’s handling of the crisis. “I have been voting for this government for 20 years, and I’m telling everyone about my anger,” said one. “I will never forgive them.” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/11/world/europe/earthquake-turkey-erdogan-election.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/11/world/europe/earthquake-t...
coffeeblack 4y ago
Just like in China with the anti-lockdown protests. The people who are recognisable on social media posts from the protests have all been arrested by now. They waited just long enough to make people forget about it before they picked them up one by one.
- ramraj07 4y ago
  That’s sad, and sincerely hope they get at least some form of a life back.
- throwawayccp 4y ago
  This is why I stopped buying anything that comes form China. No more funding CCP.
  - RhodesianHunter 4y ago
    How do you even do that? I make an effort when I have a choice but so often it seems like there is no other choice.
    - throwawayccp 4y ago
      For instance i still use 10y old Dell 14r laptop. When it became slow to run windows i switched to u Ubuntu and added SSD (not china made). I might have purchased less than 10 made in china products in the past 3 years Something is better than nothing
      - mynameisvlad 4y ago
        That Dell was still certainly made in China. And the SSD, while not manufactured in China, likely had components which were. It's practically impossible to avoid it.
        nordsieck 4y ago
        IMO, the best one can practically do is to just buy used. It's not 0 support, but it's a lot less than buying new.
dobbysfirstsock 4y ago
[dead]
binanc 4y ago
[flagged]
- arleken 4y ago
  What the hell
- seydor 4y ago
  because we like to talk to americans? that s like the kid that grabs all the toys for himself, and then has nobody to play with
  - binanc 4y ago
    > because we like to talk to americans? You think that's what twitter is? Most of us don't use twitter. > that s like the kid that grabs all the toys for himself, and then has nobody to play with No. It's more like the poor kid that has no toys and has to beg rich kids for their toys to play with. Wouldn't you want the poor kid to have his own toys? Also, having his own toys would make it more likely that other kids with toys will play with him. You misunderstood my point. There is a reason why I said social media should be a network of networks, aka the "inter"net. Once turkey and other nations have their own twitter and social media, they can connect to each other. Or you can copy paste things from other "networks" to yours and share that way. There are tons of tiktok videos on youtube and vice versa. Just because you are in your own network doesn't mean you will be isolated.
    - mynameisvlad 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - binanc 4y ago
        > You literally described isolated instances of major social networks No. It's the current state of social media. Go to youtube and look up tiktok videos. Go to tiktok and look up youtube videos. Neither are banned and yet people cross post. > Here's a hint, if your premise starts with "make your own Twitter", it can't end with "you can collaborate across these independent networks by copying and pasting your thoughts" and somehow call it not isolated. That's how twitter currently works. It's how memes from reddit end up on twitter and vice versa. I'm describing how the internet works and has always worked. What do you think "inter" in internet means? That's what I want social media to become. Using your logic, we should only have 1 social media company. Otherwise, we can't communicate with each other. Here's a hint, posts from other social and traditional media end up on HN. Amazing huh? The more networks we have, ultimately the more diversity and more connections. That was the point of the "inter"net.
xg15 4y ago
Mastodon instances: Allow us to introduce ourselves...
- pictur 4y ago
  technologies like mastodon have nothing to do with this, you idiot. please make your shitty suggestions in other posts.
  - xg15 4y ago
    ?
    - eatsyourtacos 4y ago
      I think the point is that if anyone of any significance was using Mastodon in this context like they are Twitter, they would just block that too. So it's not as if Mastodon offers anything different/better in this case.
      - celsoazevedo 4y ago
        I think it's harder to block Mastodon because there are many instances. You can block the main ones, but people can still use smaller ones to access content from all Mastodon instances. Twitter has one domain and probably a known IP range. Mastodon has (at least) hundreds of domains and IPs.
oriettaxx 4y ago
election are approaching, and anything goes in Turkey
oriettaxx 4y ago
democracy is pretty hard in Turkey: just a small example: Bedia Özgökçe Ertan was elected as mayor of Van, then sentenced to 30 years of prison just for what she said.
magwa101 4y ago
[dead]
code51 4y ago
You should realize that Twitter had become a critical source of information about people in collapsed buildings. Their friends, family and relatives were writing detailed address information in order to help rescue efforts and reach these people faster. All sorts of resource requests were also part of these tweets, so it is also part of understanding priorities for each affected area. There are already software projects collecting this information, organizing them to a structured form and carrying them over to rescue authorities.
diimdeep 4y ago
Understandable. Turkey ruling elites protecting country from possible chaos and hysteria amplified by social media. Twitter is still US based company and if asked would not turn back on US national security interests. As history shows, US tactic is to destabilize countries and make them weak, there is no better tool than social media platform like Twitter. To use Twitter right now and to take advantage of this horrible natural disaster and try to destabilize the country, is probably the easiest and best intelligence serviceman from Washington can do. This is just theory.
- SSLy 4y ago
  I'm certain people dying under rubble feel so proud spreading the USIan propaganda, yeah. The traitors.
- seydor 4y ago
  I didn't realize that HN was included in Erdogan's bot army targets
  - diimdeep 4y ago
    I dare you to say something constructive instead of this 'bot' calling. Here is video to prove my theory [0] [0] Prank with Former United States National Security Advisor John Bolton https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=895Y5G5E6g8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=895Y5G5E6g8
    - seydor 4y ago
      people using social media is not 'chaos and hysteria'. there are rescue teams on the ground , reporters etc many of whom are using twitter and certainly blockign a communication medium , any medium , in an destroyed area with devastated infrastructure under severe cold is an evil that Allah won't forgive.
    - ikeserbestian 4y ago
      I dare you to go to Turkey and help people or go fight with US or you're just another Erdogan-lover-bot. This government came this point with "US style libertarian economical and social movement" rubbish discourse and people only got "some Islamic totalitarian pressure and meaningless developments about building industry" from them which why so many people lying under the rubble this cold February night.
outwit 4y ago
You don't want people talking about who is responsible for bad construction and incompetent services right after a big disaster, do you? People might lose trust in the government </s>
netfortius 4y ago
Not to defend Erdogan by any means (passionately despise him as much as I despise Putin), but truth be told - handing to and relying on unbiased/factual information dissemination, via Twitter, in the Musk era, is something highly questionable.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- algorias 4y ago
  >in the Musk era random tweets have never been a trustworthy information source, Musk taking over has nothing to do with it.
fleddr 4y ago
Despite a 1999 warning that killed 17-18K, rampant corruption, incompetence and neglect have not improved construction standards, despite the promise to do so. That means that the vast majority of today's deaths were preventable. Imagine being accountable to that. Better to call it "misinformation".
- ikeserbestian 4y ago
  Just a mini, personal note: In 1999, collapsed buildings far more than 17k - 18k and nobody knows how many people died. I remember some 800k - 1m estimations. Today, just few videos shows at least 10k more houses was collapsed but "officials" says just 4k people died.
  - fleddr 4y ago
    You'll have to back up that 800K number. It seems pretty ridiculous: "An official Turkish estimate of 19 October 1999 placed the toll at 17,127 killed and 43,953 injured, but many sources suggest the actual figure may have been closer to 45,000 dead and a similar number injured.[6][7] Reports from September 1999 show that 120,000 poorly engineered houses were damaged beyond repair[15] and approximately 20,000 buildings collapsed, resulting in more than 250,000 people becoming homeless after the earthquake" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_%C4%B0zmit_earthquake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_%C4%B0zmit_earthquake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_natural_disasters_by_death_toll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_natural_disasters_by_d...
bannedbybros 4y ago
[dead]
carlsborg 4y ago
Unfathomable. People were literally live tweeting "save me" from under the rubble with their locations, and other people were tagging the disaster management account.
0xDEF 4y ago
At any other time this would have been more proof that Erdogan is blatantly authoritarian. However right now there is a lot of insidious fake news and disinfo on Turkish twitter. Many newly created bot accounts are pushing lies about Ukrainian refugees in Turkey, that they were hoarding aid intended for earthquake victims and stealing from the bodies of the dead. Twitter seems to be the only major social media platform that is not removing and banning these insidious lies and bot accounts. Many Turkish people are instead using Facebook to organize help and aid efforts and it's more effective than twitter because even small towns already have Facebook Groups and Pages.
- seydor 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - 0xDEF 4y ago
    A person who dislikes Turkish ultra-nationalists and fear what fake news might make them do to refugees is not exactly an "erdobot".
    - butler14 4y ago
      You think Erdogan blocked Twitter, because of stories about Ukrainian refugees hoarding supplies intended for earthquake victims? And you believe this so much you posted it on a burner account? Seems legit
    - bratbag 4y ago
      No, an account that pretends to care about those things when using them as an excuse to shut down communication that makes the government look bad.
- actionfromafar 4y ago
  TIL that Erdogan cares about refugees.
tinus_hn 4y ago
Never let a good crisis go to waste!
- ikeserbestian 4y ago
  Yes, this was the first sentence came to my mind when I saw the "police research twitter about the earthquake misinformation" news.
pphysch 4y ago
Off-topic, but threads like this make me lose hope in the West. The vast bulk of upvoted comments are deranged InfoWars-style conspiracy theories about multiple foreign countries that are deemed acceptable to spew hatred about. On a supposedly intellectual forum. If HN rules were uniformly applied, this thread would be nuked from orbit, because it is full of uncurious bile. But, because it is popular, there isn't really anything HN will do about it. Can't we have a mature conversation about the nuances of censorship during severe crises without resorting to blatant xenophobia?
foronetimeonly1 4y ago
[dead]
crazybLanKeT 4y ago
Many hours after the quake hit, he came out of wherever he was, poured out all his hatred, threats, and then went right back in. He has the complete authority over everything in the country yet no accountability in anything ever. And his stares; effing evil!
thanatropism 4y ago
Are we avoiding "Turkiye" as an expression of anti-Erdogan politics? Is it ok to call Kinshasa the capital of Rhodesia?
- mig39 4y ago
  You mean "Harare" ?
  - thanatropism 4y ago
    I meant Kinshasa, godamit. I also cited the wrong capital, so I was wrong. But I meant what I said!!
- empathy_m 4y ago
  I think the media is slow to catch up on this stuff, yeah. The AP's article[1] on the Türkiye rename was datelined from "ANKARA, Turkey (AP)" :) I don't know whether the delay is necessarily a matter of political preference or just general slowness in English-language media. The press does a good job of changing the names of sports arenas whenever the advertiser sponsorship causes a rename. This kind of inside-baseball use-of-names media stuff is something I used to see on Jim Romenesko's blog 20 years ago and it doesn't really have a good home now. It can't be all politics; although the US government still prefers "Rangoon" and "Burma", most of the press writes "Yangon" and "Myanmar".
- 4gotunameagain 4y ago
  Think of it the same as the facebook --> meta situation. There should be friction to rebranding.
albertopv 4y ago
Turkey should not be considered a democracy anymore, that's the sad reality. A country becoming a de factor dictatorship should not stay in NATO.
- murat124 4y ago
  That's fine. Turks will depose him soon. As for NATO, Turkey leaving NATO only helps Russian sphere of influence and any anti-dictatorship person would be against that.
  - albertopv 4y ago
    Turkey already bought russian arms, that's one of the reasons they should leave NATO.
  - Georgelemental 4y ago
    Tell that to the Armenians that Erdogan's good friend Ilham Aliyev wants to genocide (and that only Putin's Russia will defend)
jim_inont 4y ago
Reading the comments, I fully support return of Caliphate and saying hello to Europeans like old time. This will eventually looking more and more feasible.
throw93 4y ago
Wow, this is eerily similar to what happened in India during second wave of COVID. Tweets complaining about oxygen shortage or handling of Covid in general were restricted in India. It’s just weird why some governments do that. Playing down the crisis just delays the recovery efforts. Source - 1) https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-56883483.amp https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-56883483.amp 2) https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/recode/22410931/india-pandemic-facebook-twitter-free-speech-modi-covid-19-censorship-free-speech-takedown https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/recode/22410931/india-pande...
radres 4y ago
As a Turkish person, seeing people tweet under rubbles, hardly breathing but found some space to tweet their full address, THIS IS UNBELIEVABLE. And THIS IS MURDER. There are still people who are alive under rubbles with still some charge left on their phone. Twitter proved to be one of the most effective ways to communicate how severe their situation was.
foronetimeonly1 4y ago
[dead]
entropi 4y ago
This is just pure evil. The government so far was pretty much useless; and with this they are now actively preventing people from organizing themselves. A net negative, after years of paying taxes. And probably the greatest contributor to this tragedy was the lack of oversight for construction codes and safety regulations in the first place. 1- Cause thousands of preventable deaths 2- dont even try to help 3- impede those who are trying to help. This is a new low, even for the president.
alienalp 4y ago
I am not here to defend twitter block however considering topic filled with political comments i want to fix some misunderstanding. Twitter is used as alternative channel yet critical for organization of volunteers . They say their operation hit by 70%. However people first ask help from official channel than seek alternatives arriving twitter as first option. Saying that people asking help under rubble from twitter is straight out political comment. Block happened like 65+ hours after earthquake. 95%+ of rescue operation runs over official channel. At this point is not that important anymore but I have never seen single tweet that points out you should shut down your phone in area so people under rubble have better change of reception. Which is insane. Volunteers going there complaining phone/internet not working properly not aware they are potentially blocking people under rubble from access to phone yet complaining about twitter ban. I am not defending block nor underestimating damage to volunteer organization (about distribution of help) just attempting to balance against political comments. By the way twitter block is lifted again.
honeybadger1 4y ago
They shouldn't be in NATO.

741 points by flixing 4y ago

just incredible... That's one of the very few platforms where people organise help, and share locations of where help is needed.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

m000 4y ago

Elections are around the corner, and Erdogan's approval ratings have been dropping even before the earthquake. Just saying...

MonkeyClub 4y ago
Things might get even hairier given the elections and the popularity drop due to both politics and the earthquake. It’s possible that a state of emergency on account of the earthquake will postpone the elections.
- ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
  In other countries the population will unite after natural disasters, and leadership is usually given credit for the response as long as they continue support for local response efforts set up in the immediate aftermath. Why would popularity of the leader drop so quickly due to an earthquake? It's been what 36 hours. At this point almost all committed resources will still be highly local...
  - actionfromafar 4y ago
    In autocratic regimes, the leaders get all the cred for things going well, but they also are seen as responsible if things crumble.
  - sgc 4y ago
    Potentially because they cut off social media essential to life-saving efforts, and focus on managing optics rather than providing concrete help? Just a stab in the dark, but who knows.
  - slt2021 4y ago
    because Erdogan's relatives were heavily involved in construction industry and these flopped buildings are result of Erdogan's family dealings
    - ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
      Thanks. That is an answer which makes sense.
  - netsharc 4y ago
    Well, either Erdogan knows he's deeply unpopular, so he/his lackeys has to censor all the bad news and criticism so he/they can look a bit better, or he's afraid he's deeply unpopular, which means a bit of self-awareness of what a raging asshole dictator but useless leader he is... Fun times! A leader that actually cares but is overwhelmed would probably not be afraid of admitting that, s/he could rally the population together to overcome the tragedy despite their lack of resources. I think Dubya managed to convey this with 9/11, no one really knew how bad decisions by his administration lead to the threat being unnoticed. Meanwhile with Erdogan, he's been the boss for many years, the public probably thinks: The government's not able to rescue people effectively? Well, that's because it's been a kleptocracy for a long time.
PM_me_your_math 4y ago
Elections are meaningless if you can print millions of untraceable mail-in ballots and do not enforce rigorous ID requirements. Furthermore, elections are even less meaningless if you can imprison the opposition or destroy them in media under false and contrived pretense.
- roamerz 4y ago
  [flagged]
throwawayccp 4y ago
Religion is the Trump card in those countries

RobinUS2 4y ago

In the case of protests etc I'd understand the goal behind it from certain actors involved, but why in this case?

jonasdegendt 4y ago
I'm not up to date on how the Turkish government is handling this but I'm willing to bet it has something to do with how they're not doing a great job at proving aid to the affected region, and they're trying to contain that information to save face.
- RobinUS2 4y ago
  Reading a bit it seems to be potentially that the recommendations after the last big quake haven't been followed up properly. So basically stronger building requirements, with government validation was the plan; in reality not done (properly) and "checked" by paid companies.
  - postingawayonhn 4y ago
    My first thought on seeing some of the images was that there must be some criminal negligence involved. There is one area with 20 or so similar looking apartment buildings (about 6 levels each) where every second one has completely pancaked. I was in Christchurch, New Zealand during the 2011 earthquakes. Only 2 major building completely collapsed. One had been designed by an engineer with insufficient qualifications and the other had design issues that were previously identified but never addressed.
    - baybal2 4y ago
      [dead]
  - scythe 4y ago
    It's worth noting in context that Erodgan is heavily involved in the Turkish real estate industry: https://www.duvarenglish.com/amp/president-erdogan-the-worlds-biggest-real-estate-agent-news-57329 https://www.duvarenglish.com/amp/president-erdogan-the-world...

lessname 4y ago

This is so sad because twitter is still mainly used by people to help each other, e.g. to tell where help is needed or who can help.

philipov 4y ago
With authoritarian regimes, having someone who's not a representative of the regime doing anything to help others is often seen as a threat to the authority of the government.

GalenErso 4y ago

[flagged]

niij 4y ago
Please keep comments like this on Reddit.

Darmody 4y ago

People asked Elon Musk on twitter to deploy Starlink to Turkey and he said he can't because it is not approved. I wonder why.

Fellshard 4y ago
Erdogan explicitly declined it when Musk offered.
- anticensor 4y ago
  The main probable cause for it is that Starlink wanted to offer it unfiltered, as they normally do in all other cases of emergency relief coverage; but the Turkish government wanted the regular filtering.
IG_Semmelweiss 4y ago
There is a difference between war and executive priviledges. The former (Russia) unilaterally imposed a decision (war) on another government and its people. The latter (erdogan) is acting in his capacity as the elected representative of the people. Starlink cannot override the decision of the elected executive. He needs approval for that.
- malfist 4y ago
  Approval from whom?
  - vinceguidry 4y ago
    The state. In the case of UA that was Zelensky. In Turkey it's Erdogan. HNer often seem to have this weird idea that companies can take governments head-on.
    - postingawayonhn 4y ago
      Depends on the countries involved. The US has backed SpaceX in enabling Starlink service in Iran.

middleclick 4y ago

[dead]

nemo44x 4y ago

What about "tooting"? Can they "toot" still?

bronikowski 4y ago
They could block big instances but have no chance of blocking smaller ones due the distributed nature. But the same goes for blogs, e-mails and other forms of information exchange. The problem is none of those have global audience like Twitter does, love it or hate it.

can16358p 4y ago

Turkish here. This is unbelievable, but totally expected from the current "democractic" government. Social media usage is very high in Türkiye and people are coordinating using social media (mainly Twitter) for rescue operations in near realtime. I'm pretty much sure some people will literally die under wreckage because of communication interruptions as the result of this block. (For anyone telling to use VPN, yeah, many people are used to using VPN because of these blocks which also happened in the past, but not everyone is tech savvy and it's not reliable for life-or-death situations.

rayiner 4y ago
When you use quotes around “Democratic” do you mean the elections are rigged? I’m not familiar with the legitimacy or lack thereof of Turkish elections.
- anticensor 4y ago
  One incident even featured a pre-filled ballot indicating a vote for then-ruling parties.
  - gumby 4y ago
    Decades ago one of my profs described his voting experience in the USSR: they had a completely private (“Australian”) voting system where you picked up a ballot, entered a private voting booth, filled out the ballot, then deposited it in the urn. Or you could pick up a ballot pre-filled-in with the straight communist ticket to save time and just put it straight in the urn. Naturally anyone in the room could see which you chose. Perhaps more amusingly: he was an exchange student at the time (late 60s?). Because communism was a universal movement anyone could vote, so he thought, “well why not while I have the chance?”
- can16358p 4y ago
  They are not elected democratically, and they are not deciding on anything democratically, even though it is "democratic" on paper.
- 4y ago

mrtksn 4y ago

Erdogan's first speech was almost 2 days after the earthquake and he said "We are monitoring who said what on the social media and tried to provoke the people. Today it's not the day to go after those but we take notes and when the day comes, we will go after them". Just look at his face when delivering this speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doy38aKbMw4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doy38aKbMw4 It's like from V for Vendetta. The lighting choice is very particular. Twitter was heavily used to seek help by people in turmoil, even hundreds of people were posting from under the rubbles. The officials were claiming that everything was under control and they are helping everyone but people were posting videos showing the situation on the ground and the situation didn't look even close to being under control. The head of communications of Erdogan even introduced an app to streamline "reporting disinformation". Like, it's the second day after a massive earthquake and they published a f*king app to snitch people. Here is the announcement of the app, early at 05:00 local time in the morning 24 hours after the quake: https://twitter.com/fahrettinaltun/status/1622777204852592640/photo/1 https://twitter.com/fahrettinaltun/status/162277720485259264... Also there were many incidents of the mainstream media cutting of talks or turning away the camera when people said or did anything discrediting the official narrative. Yesterday, some people with prominent accounts who shared the tweets from the people in the region began reporting that they were taken into custody by the police. I guess the day has come quickly.

golergka 4y ago
This is one of many, many reasons why western countries and social media companies should not normalise censorship re-branded like "fighting disinformation".
- luckylion 4y ago
  Not sure that would make a difference. Western societies have an issue with genocide, so Russia claims Ukraine was committing genocide against Russians. If Westerners didn't care about genocide, Russia would've claimed something else, Putin certainly has no issue with genocide. So if our thing du jure wasn't misinformation, I'm sure they'd just claim they're using their powers to combat hate speech or whatever else is culturally okay. If there's really nothing available, there's always "we need to protect the children from predators who are trying to abuse this dire situation". In the end, it doesn't matter if you're in power. Your tribe will always be with you, no matter the reason you're giving, and the opposition will be silenced.

bloaf 4y ago

There is/was an active disinformation campaign on Twitter attempting to link the earthquake to Türkiye denying Nato expansion. The ridiculous conspiracy theory is that the US used a HAARP system to cause the earthquake in retaliation. Not saying that's the reason for the ban, but twitter is not solely a force for good here.

college_physics 4y ago
Maybe the US used mind control to force (over several decades) Turkish contractors to build house-of-cards on top of a major tectonic plate fracture line? But indeed our comms/social channels are just a mess - that we pay for dearly when real suffering hits us. We knew that much from the pandemic already.
PM_me_your_math 4y ago
That's annoying. HAARP is essentially just a steerable RF beam that heats the ionosphere for RF propagation research, or can be used to bounce RF off of the moon. Neither have any effects on fault line stress or slippage that I am aware of. So herein lies the point of all this. People who know its bullshit, know its bullshit, and can tell other people (who don't know) that it is bullshit. It should not be up to any government or company to use force or coercion to meter any idea or speech unless it is, on the rarest of occasion, illegal. Our civilization is more connected than ever before. We have access to untold volumes of knowledge. Greater than any library in history. If he were alive today, Aristarchus of Samothrace, the 6th head librarian of the Library of Alexandria, would give his left nut for just 10 minutes on the internet. We built a vast and wonderful civilization that is almost to the star-faring stage, and we did it without government censors or censorship by ideologues. The very notion of some bureaucrat, state actor, or crybully mod deciding what you should think or read insults the collective intelligence and struggle for absolute truth from the last 2500 years of human history.
- qbrass 4y ago
  A secret HAARP-like device that causes directed earthquakes was literally from the movie The Core. It use is what kicked off the plot. Being able to say that the Earth's core stopped just like what happened in the movie makes the earthquake machine theory more plausible or something.

remind_me_again 4y ago

[dead]

EGreg 4y ago

This is why we need an open source alternative that communities can use to self-organize and recover after disasters: https://qbix.com/blog/2019/03/08/how-qbix-platform-can-change-the-world/ https://qbix.com/blog/2019/03/08/how-qbix-platform-can-chang... The future of decentralization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzMm7-j7yIY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzMm7-j7yIY Otherwise all we have is outrage at governments and corporations, but they have all the power and all the software too.

zoobab 4y ago

Time for Nostr.

rvz 4y ago
Time for what?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Lord_Zero 4y ago
  Nostr.
- throwaway69123 4y ago
  Nostrel
Laaas 4y ago
Nostr isn't decentralised. Why do you shill for it? It's not much better than Twitter.

Jun8 4y ago

Words fail me! This is a serious impediment to search & rescuer efforts as well as coordination for money and other donations. The pretext given for the closure was that Twitter owed money to the Turkish government. You can see the anger of locals where a mob reacts to Minister of Transportation’s visit: https://youtube.com/shorts/B7t9W7Qgpfs?feature=share https://youtube.com/shorts/B7t9W7Qgpfs?feature=share WhatsApp isage is ubiquitous in Turkey but it seems this morning people are seeing problems with that, too.

m0guz 4y ago

Insane. Developers are trying to make the best use of Twitter. * https://huggingface.co/deprem-ml https://huggingface.co/deprem-ml * https://deprem.io https://deprem.io * https://deprem.basarsoft.com.tr https://deprem.basarsoft.com.tr * https://go.ahb.app/guvenliharita https://go.ahb.app/guvenliharita * https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1QpICWDVpd3eIScSvajnMXg45YrTOS7A&ll=36.241283100536464%2C36.9957036773029&z=9 https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1QpICWDVpd3eIScSvaj... * https://depremenkaz.xyz https://depremenkaz.xyz Almost all the info listed on these websites coming from twitter.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
wmeredith 4y ago
This is a tragedy, and it's great that people are trying to help in any way they can. However, building stuff on Twitter's platform seems like utter folly these days.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  Truthfully it was a bad idea when Jack Dorsey owned it too - now that Musk is in charge, it's a no-brainer.
- vbezhenar 4y ago
  What's the alternative? You need the database. It must scale and be reliable. It must have proper UI. People must be able to use it without prior learning. Let's say you create a website from the scratch. You need to use some cloud database. You need to build a simple UI which will work with bad network. You have few hours to do that. You need not to go bankrupt because entire country suddenly will use your app. Twitter is well known to everyone. Twitter has API which basically allows to use it as a simple database. Twitter is web scale and can handle the load. Twitter has solid battle tested website and apps. And everything is completely free. IMO it's a unique proposition and nothing compares to it. If you have enough time, you can build better specialized app, that's for sure.

saiya-jin 4y ago

This is playbook of scumbag tyrants, doesn't matter if Putin, Erdogan or similar. I for sure hope EU politicians are taking a note too, there are 2 existential threats to democratic free Europe long term - Russia and Turkey. Both have same ambitions, are on completely opposite side of all crucial values free world holds dear. Luckily their competence severely lags behind their ambitions, to think Turkey was for some time considered to join EU... I think Ataturk would be heavily depressed if he witnessed present day Turkey and its leaders.

coffeeblack 4y ago
You are underestimating the threat that CCP China is, not just to Europe but to the entire world.
- unityByFreedom 4y ago
  China's exit, as happened 70-80 years ago, would cause us to have to work more. That might not be such a bad thing, though I doubt it will happen to the same degree. It's still fresh in everyone's mind.
- pphysch 4y ago
  No, you are just susceptible to "threat inflation". It's a very profitable industry in Washington. One country misplaces a few weather balloons, another has hundreds of overseas military bases and bombs pipelines. Yet it's the former that is a "global threat", because the latter says so. Eye roll.
  - ivalm 4y ago
    The former is also claiming that many territories it doesn’t hold are actually theirs and countries around the former are asking the latter to come help them defend in case of former’s attack.
geysersam 4y ago
Maybe if EU hadn't been so reluctant to let them in that would've put them on another path than the one they are going now.

halilb 4y ago

I live in Turkey and was very close to the earthquake epicenter. I can say that communication in affected cities is very limited and Twitter had a real positive effect on organizing help and reaching out to lots of people in the area. So blocking Twitter right now is pure evil. They are only interested in the optics and looking strong for the upcoming election and do not care about anything else. I saw some people waiting for their relatives to get rescued around collapsed buildings dare to say that they haven't received any official help so far in the news. And they said that "government can come and arrest me for saying this - so be it". I don't think the Turkish government is reading HN but still feeling a little bit anxious while posting this after witnessing so many weird things here.

unityByFreedom 4y ago
It's a tragedy no nation should face alone. There should be no "looking bad" here, just opportunities to help. Why not embrace that and do whatever you can? Any city would face horrible losses in this situation. Heck, Miami lost half a building on a normal day...
- foronetimeonly1 4y ago
  [dead]
jrochkind1 4y ago
Do you think it will actually harm Erdogan's support though, anger over blocking twitter?
- widowlark 4y ago
  Is his popular support relevant when he has his hands on the levers of government operations?
  - jrochkind1 4y ago
    > Anger Over Quake Response Challenges Erdogan Ahead of Election > A furor is building among some survivors over the government’s handling of the crisis. “I have been voting for this government for 20 years, and I’m telling everyone about my anger,” said one. “I will never forgive them.” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/11/world/europe/earthquake-turkey-erdogan-election.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/11/world/europe/earthquake-t...

coffeeblack 4y ago

Just like in China with the anti-lockdown protests. The people who are recognisable on social media posts from the protests have all been arrested by now. They waited just long enough to make people forget about it before they picked them up one by one.

ramraj07 4y ago
That’s sad, and sincerely hope they get at least some form of a life back.
throwawayccp 4y ago
This is why I stopped buying anything that comes form China. No more funding CCP.
- RhodesianHunter 4y ago
  How do you even do that? I make an effort when I have a choice but so often it seems like there is no other choice.
  - throwawayccp 4y ago
    For instance i still use 10y old Dell 14r laptop. When it became slow to run windows i switched to u Ubuntu and added SSD (not china made). I might have purchased less than 10 made in china products in the past 3 years Something is better than nothing
    - mynameisvlad 4y ago
      That Dell was still certainly made in China. And the SSD, while not manufactured in China, likely had components which were. It's practically impossible to avoid it.
      - nordsieck 4y ago
        IMO, the best one can practically do is to just buy used. It's not 0 support, but it's a lot less than buying new.

dobbysfirstsock 4y ago

[dead]

binanc 4y ago

[flagged]

arleken 4y ago
What the hell
seydor 4y ago
because we like to talk to americans? that s like the kid that grabs all the toys for himself, and then has nobody to play with
- binanc 4y ago
  > because we like to talk to americans? You think that's what twitter is? Most of us don't use twitter. > that s like the kid that grabs all the toys for himself, and then has nobody to play with No. It's more like the poor kid that has no toys and has to beg rich kids for their toys to play with. Wouldn't you want the poor kid to have his own toys? Also, having his own toys would make it more likely that other kids with toys will play with him. You misunderstood my point. There is a reason why I said social media should be a network of networks, aka the "inter"net. Once turkey and other nations have their own twitter and social media, they can connect to each other. Or you can copy paste things from other "networks" to yours and share that way. There are tons of tiktok videos on youtube and vice versa. Just because you are in your own network doesn't mean you will be isolated.
  - mynameisvlad 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - binanc 4y ago
      > You literally described isolated instances of major social networks No. It's the current state of social media. Go to youtube and look up tiktok videos. Go to tiktok and look up youtube videos. Neither are banned and yet people cross post. > Here's a hint, if your premise starts with "make your own Twitter", it can't end with "you can collaborate across these independent networks by copying and pasting your thoughts" and somehow call it not isolated. That's how twitter currently works. It's how memes from reddit end up on twitter and vice versa. I'm describing how the internet works and has always worked. What do you think "inter" in internet means? That's what I want social media to become. Using your logic, we should only have 1 social media company. Otherwise, we can't communicate with each other. Here's a hint, posts from other social and traditional media end up on HN. Amazing huh? The more networks we have, ultimately the more diversity and more connections. That was the point of the "inter"net.

xg15 4y ago

Mastodon instances: Allow us to introduce ourselves...

pictur 4y ago
technologies like mastodon have nothing to do with this, you idiot. please make your shitty suggestions in other posts.
- xg15 4y ago
  ?
  - eatsyourtacos 4y ago
    I think the point is that if anyone of any significance was using Mastodon in this context like they are Twitter, they would just block that too. So it's not as if Mastodon offers anything different/better in this case.
    - celsoazevedo 4y ago
      I think it's harder to block Mastodon because there are many instances. You can block the main ones, but people can still use smaller ones to access content from all Mastodon instances. Twitter has one domain and probably a known IP range. Mastodon has (at least) hundreds of domains and IPs.

oriettaxx 4y ago

election are approaching, and anything goes in Turkey

oriettaxx 4y ago

democracy is pretty hard in Turkey: just a small example: Bedia Özgökçe Ertan was elected as mayor of Van, then sentenced to 30 years of prison just for what she said.

magwa101 4y ago

[dead]

code51 4y ago

You should realize that Twitter had become a critical source of information about people in collapsed buildings. Their friends, family and relatives were writing detailed address information in order to help rescue efforts and reach these people faster. All sorts of resource requests were also part of these tweets, so it is also part of understanding priorities for each affected area. There are already software projects collecting this information, organizing them to a structured form and carrying them over to rescue authorities.

diimdeep 4y ago

Understandable. Turkey ruling elites protecting country from possible chaos and hysteria amplified by social media. Twitter is still US based company and if asked would not turn back on US national security interests. As history shows, US tactic is to destabilize countries and make them weak, there is no better tool than social media platform like Twitter. To use Twitter right now and to take advantage of this horrible natural disaster and try to destabilize the country, is probably the easiest and best intelligence serviceman from Washington can do. This is just theory.

SSLy 4y ago
I'm certain people dying under rubble feel so proud spreading the USIan propaganda, yeah. The traitors.
seydor 4y ago
I didn't realize that HN was included in Erdogan's bot army targets
- diimdeep 4y ago
  I dare you to say something constructive instead of this 'bot' calling. Here is video to prove my theory [0] [0] Prank with Former United States National Security Advisor John Bolton https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=895Y5G5E6g8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=895Y5G5E6g8
  - seydor 4y ago
    people using social media is not 'chaos and hysteria'. there are rescue teams on the ground , reporters etc many of whom are using twitter and certainly blockign a communication medium , any medium , in an destroyed area with devastated infrastructure under severe cold is an evil that Allah won't forgive.
  - ikeserbestian 4y ago
    I dare you to go to Turkey and help people or go fight with US or you're just another Erdogan-lover-bot. This government came this point with "US style libertarian economical and social movement" rubbish discourse and people only got "some Islamic totalitarian pressure and meaningless developments about building industry" from them which why so many people lying under the rubble this cold February night.

outwit 4y ago

You don't want people talking about who is responsible for bad construction and incompetent services right after a big disaster, do you? People might lose trust in the government </s>

netfortius 4y ago

Not to defend Erdogan by any means (passionately despise him as much as I despise Putin), but truth be told - handing to and relying on unbiased/factual information dissemination, via Twitter, in the Musk era, is something highly questionable.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
algorias 4y ago
>in the Musk era random tweets have never been a trustworthy information source, Musk taking over has nothing to do with it.

fleddr 4y ago

Despite a 1999 warning that killed 17-18K, rampant corruption, incompetence and neglect have not improved construction standards, despite the promise to do so. That means that the vast majority of today's deaths were preventable. Imagine being accountable to that. Better to call it "misinformation".

ikeserbestian 4y ago
Just a mini, personal note: In 1999, collapsed buildings far more than 17k - 18k and nobody knows how many people died. I remember some 800k - 1m estimations. Today, just few videos shows at least 10k more houses was collapsed but "officials" says just 4k people died.
- fleddr 4y ago
  You'll have to back up that 800K number. It seems pretty ridiculous: "An official Turkish estimate of 19 October 1999 placed the toll at 17,127 killed and 43,953 injured, but many sources suggest the actual figure may have been closer to 45,000 dead and a similar number injured.[6][7] Reports from September 1999 show that 120,000 poorly engineered houses were damaged beyond repair[15] and approximately 20,000 buildings collapsed, resulting in more than 250,000 people becoming homeless after the earthquake" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_%C4%B0zmit_earthquake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_%C4%B0zmit_earthquake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_natural_disasters_by_death_toll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_natural_disasters_by_d...

bannedbybros 4y ago

[dead]

carlsborg 4y ago

Unfathomable. People were literally live tweeting "save me" from under the rubble with their locations, and other people were tagging the disaster management account.

0xDEF 4y ago

At any other time this would have been more proof that Erdogan is blatantly authoritarian. However right now there is a lot of insidious fake news and disinfo on Turkish twitter. Many newly created bot accounts are pushing lies about Ukrainian refugees in Turkey, that they were hoarding aid intended for earthquake victims and stealing from the bodies of the dead. Twitter seems to be the only major social media platform that is not removing and banning these insidious lies and bot accounts. Many Turkish people are instead using Facebook to organize help and aid efforts and it's more effective than twitter because even small towns already have Facebook Groups and Pages.

seydor 4y ago
[flagged]
- 0xDEF 4y ago
  A person who dislikes Turkish ultra-nationalists and fear what fake news might make them do to refugees is not exactly an "erdobot".
  - butler14 4y ago
    You think Erdogan blocked Twitter, because of stories about Ukrainian refugees hoarding supplies intended for earthquake victims? And you believe this so much you posted it on a burner account? Seems legit
  - bratbag 4y ago
    No, an account that pretends to care about those things when using them as an excuse to shut down communication that makes the government look bad.
actionfromafar 4y ago
TIL that Erdogan cares about refugees.

tinus_hn 4y ago

Never let a good crisis go to waste!

ikeserbestian 4y ago
Yes, this was the first sentence came to my mind when I saw the "police research twitter about the earthquake misinformation" news.

pphysch 4y ago

Off-topic, but threads like this make me lose hope in the West. The vast bulk of upvoted comments are deranged InfoWars-style conspiracy theories about multiple foreign countries that are deemed acceptable to spew hatred about. On a supposedly intellectual forum. If HN rules were uniformly applied, this thread would be nuked from orbit, because it is full of uncurious bile. But, because it is popular, there isn't really anything HN will do about it. Can't we have a mature conversation about the nuances of censorship during severe crises without resorting to blatant xenophobia?

foronetimeonly1 4y ago

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crazybLanKeT 4y ago

Many hours after the quake hit, he came out of wherever he was, poured out all his hatred, threats, and then went right back in. He has the complete authority over everything in the country yet no accountability in anything ever. And his stares; effing evil!

thanatropism 4y ago

Are we avoiding "Turkiye" as an expression of anti-Erdogan politics? Is it ok to call Kinshasa the capital of Rhodesia?

mig39 4y ago
You mean "Harare" ?
- thanatropism 4y ago
  I meant Kinshasa, godamit. I also cited the wrong capital, so I was wrong. But I meant what I said!!
empathy_m 4y ago
I think the media is slow to catch up on this stuff, yeah. The AP's article[1] on the Türkiye rename was datelined from "ANKARA, Turkey (AP)" :) I don't know whether the delay is necessarily a matter of political preference or just general slowness in English-language media. The press does a good job of changing the names of sports arenas whenever the advertiser sponsorship causes a rename. This kind of inside-baseball use-of-names media stuff is something I used to see on Jim Romenesko's blog 20 years ago and it doesn't really have a good home now. It can't be all politics; although the US government still prefers "Rangoon" and "Burma", most of the press writes "Yangon" and "Myanmar".
4gotunameagain 4y ago
Think of it the same as the facebook --> meta situation. There should be friction to rebranding.

albertopv 4y ago

Turkey should not be considered a democracy anymore, that's the sad reality. A country becoming a de factor dictatorship should not stay in NATO.

murat124 4y ago
That's fine. Turks will depose him soon. As for NATO, Turkey leaving NATO only helps Russian sphere of influence and any anti-dictatorship person would be against that.
- albertopv 4y ago
  Turkey already bought russian arms, that's one of the reasons they should leave NATO.
- Georgelemental 4y ago
  Tell that to the Armenians that Erdogan's good friend Ilham Aliyev wants to genocide (and that only Putin's Russia will defend)

jim_inont 4y ago

Reading the comments, I fully support return of Caliphate and saying hello to Europeans like old time. This will eventually looking more and more feasible.

throw93 4y ago

Wow, this is eerily similar to what happened in India during second wave of COVID. Tweets complaining about oxygen shortage or handling of Covid in general were restricted in India. It’s just weird why some governments do that. Playing down the crisis just delays the recovery efforts. Source - 1) https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-56883483.amp https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-56883483.amp 2) https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/recode/22410931/india-pandemic-facebook-twitter-free-speech-modi-covid-19-censorship-free-speech-takedown https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/recode/22410931/india-pande...

radres 4y ago

As a Turkish person, seeing people tweet under rubbles, hardly breathing but found some space to tweet their full address, THIS IS UNBELIEVABLE. And THIS IS MURDER. There are still people who are alive under rubbles with still some charge left on their phone. Twitter proved to be one of the most effective ways to communicate how severe their situation was.

foronetimeonly1 4y ago

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entropi 4y ago

This is just pure evil. The government so far was pretty much useless; and with this they are now actively preventing people from organizing themselves. A net negative, after years of paying taxes. And probably the greatest contributor to this tragedy was the lack of oversight for construction codes and safety regulations in the first place. 1- Cause thousands of preventable deaths 2- dont even try to help 3- impede those who are trying to help. This is a new low, even for the president.

alienalp 4y ago

I am not here to defend twitter block however considering topic filled with political comments i want to fix some misunderstanding. Twitter is used as alternative channel yet critical for organization of volunteers . They say their operation hit by 70%. However people first ask help from official channel than seek alternatives arriving twitter as first option. Saying that people asking help under rubble from twitter is straight out political comment. Block happened like 65+ hours after earthquake. 95%+ of rescue operation runs over official channel. At this point is not that important anymore but I have never seen single tweet that points out you should shut down your phone in area so people under rubble have better change of reception. Which is insane. Volunteers going there complaining phone/internet not working properly not aware they are potentially blocking people under rubble from access to phone yet complaining about twitter ban. I am not defending block nor underestimating damage to volunteer organization (about distribution of help) just attempting to balance against political comments. By the way twitter block is lifted again.

honeybadger1 4y ago

They shouldn't be in NATO.