Tag: Turkey

Westerner’s such as all of the analysts at HamiltonFinanceServices.com have never heard of Teoman Coskun Dudak, the latest social net hero of Turkey. If not for the data scraping services of Vocativ.com, most people throughout the world could never hear of him.

And what did Dudak do? He just did his job as a customs inspector at a Turkish airport. He refused to let a plane loaded with 1.5 tons of gold under false papers take off despite being offered a generous bribe by Iranian businessman Reza Sarrab. Sarrab called a Turkish politician, the then minister of the economy, Zafer Caglayan, who authorized take off of the gold laden plane. For his part, Dudak was immediately transferred south to a post on the Syrian border. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/88b881f0-af53-11e3-bea5-00144feab7de.html#axzz2wWxzdYcI

How do you and I know about Dudak today? Turkish citizens heard about Dudak when unidentified sources complained on various social networks about the unfair treatment of Dudak for being so honest. For his part, Dudak declined comment. However, as word spread throughout Turkey of Dudak’s honesty, the story was scraped up by data miners and now the world knows the Dudak story.

Why did Turkish citizens like the story in the first place? Apparently bribery among government officials runs so rampantly that many citizens feel frustrated and intolerant of such dishonesty. Dudak became a folk hero because he brought back a sense of honor in a nation sickened by its leaders’ lack of honor.

What do you think?

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?

Teoman Dudak, New Turkish Hero Online

Turkey Solves Bad Image by Facebook and YouTube Shutdown?