Turkey blocks political websites @ 03 Jun 2015
By Edri.org
Engelli Web is an independent monitoring website that lists websites blocked by the Turkish government. Currently it lists over 80 000 domains and the number keeps rising. The real figure is probably much higher, because the government does not disclose the exact list of banned sites.

Although the majority of the sites are blocked on the basis of containing illegal contents or services, websites with contents related to for example politics and Kurdish insurgency are also blocked. While Turkish Internet users are very much interested in the political corruption in the highest echelons of politics, relevant websites do not exist. This scarcity could be seen as a result of the perception that they will be banned anyway. Instead, the news and ideas in these categories are usually disseminated in global social media platforms such as Twitter where they get more international visibility if they get banned. In recent years, blocking of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube in the country has frequently raised international concerns.

There is a notable exception of government blocking of political websites whose political direction appears to be more in tune with that of the government.

Islamist websites in Turkey manage to evade strict Internet censorship (13.03.2015)  

Turkey court issues arrest warrants in MIT truck probe (07.05.2015) 

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Video purports to show Turkish intelligence shipping arms to Syria (29.05.2015)  

The world has seen the main culprit (only in Turkish, 31.05.2015)