Turkey Solves Bad Image by Facebook and YouTube Shutdown?

 

Just ban Facebook and YouTube if your image sinks under the weight of fraud allegations based on direct voice recordings posted to social media by your political enemies. That’s how Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan handles it. http://www.reuters.com/video/2014/03/07/turkeys-pm-threatening-to-ban-facebook-y?videoId=289456498&videoChannel=6

 

Not so fast, says the Turkish president, Abdullah Gül. And so the political dervish spins in Turkey, and now the PM has backed down. http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/turkish-pm-backtracks-on-social-media-ban-threat/2014/03/11/fc260e12-a91a-11e3-8a7b-c1c684e2671f_story.html

 

The larger question will persist long after the Turkish controversy passes. Why would any government seek to shut down such media? Of course, some governments with openly corrupt leaders seek to maintain power, but in other situations there might arise better reasons to contemplate shut down. In Thailand today, for example, apparently malicious use of Facebook and Twitter has caused death. http://www.nationmultimedia.com/opinion/Social-media-marvellous-tools-that-could-also-be-g-30226491.html

 

The technical challenge of shutting down seems less important to the Chinese government. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/committee-to-protect-journalists/liu-jianfeng-tests-new-mo_b_4913654.html

 

So here at http://HamiltonFinanceServices.com (HFS) we pose the meta-question about the politics of the Internet: When is a government justified in shutting down its citizen’s access to the Internet and its various versions of social networks?

 

To analysts at HFS, the problem lies in the nature of political contests, where no winner remains for long and most issues may be understood from multiple perspectives. So long as power exists to potentially shut down citizen access, the Internet will remain a tool of politicians and their technicians.

 

What do you think?