Twitter Blocked In Turkey As The Country’s Prime Minister Pledges To ‘Eradicate’ It

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Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Thursday during his  campaign trail that he is going to maksure twitter , the micro blogging site is blocked in the country.

“We will eradicate Twitter,” Erdoğan told a rally in Bursa in the west of the country. “I don’t care what the international community says. Everyone will witness the power of the Turkish Republic.” There are roughly 10 million Twitter users based in Turkey.

The Prime Minister’s office issued a statement saying that Turkish officials had “no option” other than to ban Twitter, according to Reuters.

Shortly afterwards, tweets and screenshots began to show that Twitter (and possibly also Facebook) was being blocked in Turkey, as of 4:30pm ET. Many Twitter users were sharing a forum on Wikileaks with advice on how Turkish Twitter users can still access the site.

Twitter says it’s investigating claims that its service is blocked. Meanwhile its governmental division responded by posting this tweet — once in English, and again in Turkish. “#TwitterisblockedinTurkey” and “#DictatorErdogan” were the top trending hashtags worldwide on Twitter by Thursday afternoon.

Erdoğan appears to have made use of a recent and highly controversial law, passed by the Turkish Parliament, that allows the government’s Telecommunications Board to “shut down” websites based on anything it judges to be “privacy violations.” Two weeks ago, he also threatened to shut down Facebook and YouTube.

“Some known circles immediately rebelled against this Internet law,” Erdoğan said in a TV interview on March 6. “We are determined we won’t let the Turkish people be sacrificed to YouTube and Facebook.” He claimed that “those people [the social media services] incite any kind of immorality or espionage for the profit of these institutions.”

Erdoğan has been down on social media ever since the summer of 2013, when protesters filled Taksim Square in Istanbul to complain about the closure of a local park — and were met by police with tear gas. The Prime Minster described Twitter as a “troublemaker” that helped organize those protests.