ISTANBUL – Hürriyet Daily News

The report, prepared for the United Nations Democracy Fund, showed that access to YouTube alone was blocked approximately 20 times between March 2007 and November 2010.

Internet freedom in Turkey has deteriorated due to the government’s limiting of access to certain information, including political content, a report by the Washington-based advocacy group Freedom House has said.

Online freedom has been hampered by the continuous blocking of certain applications, particularly file-sharing sites such as YouTube, Last.fm and Metacafe, whose users have filed cases with the European Court of Human Rights over the last two years, according to the report, Freedom on the Net 2011.

The report, prepared for the United Nations Democracy Fund, showed that access to YouTube alone was blocked approximately 20 times between March 2007 and November 2010. It added that lack of transparency in blocking decisions makes it difficult for site owners or users to appeal.

Censorship has increased along with Internet access and speed, and around 5,000 websites have been banned since 2001, according to the survey, daily Hürriyet reported Wednesday.

Turkey ranks 10th among the countries with “partially free” Internet usage, Hürriyet wrote. The Freedom House ranking gives higher numerical scores to countries with more censorship. Turkey’s score went up to 45 from 42 last year, showing an increase in restrictions on Internet freedom.

The sites MySpace and Dailymotion; blog-hosting sites such as WordPress and Blogger; Google groups; and the photo-sharing website Slide are among those that are regularly blocked, the report said.

Additionally, the procedures taken by the courts or the Telecommunications Directorate, or TİB, to block websites are not transparent, making it difficult for those seeking to appeal the rulings, the report said. Site owners often have trouble determining why their sites have been blocked and which court issued the order, as the reasoning behind court decisions is not provided in blocking notices.

The report also noted the backlash against ban decisions, describing the legal challenge mounted by Turkish activists against the government’s controversial move to block Google-related services in June 2010, which was criticized by millions of Internet users.

According to the report, the government primarily focuses on blocking websites that contain materials that promote sexual exploitation, child abuse, obscenity or gambling, while websites deemed to insult Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, are a particularly common target of bans.

Government censorship of the Internet has increased in recent years with the enacting in May 2007 of the “Regulation of Publications on the Internet and Suppression of Crimes Committed by Means of Such Publication.”

Estonia was considered the most free among the countries surveyed, followed by the United States, Germany, Australia, England, Italy, South Africa and Brazil. The countries of Kenya, Mexico, South Korea, Georgia, Nigeria, India, Malaysia and Jordan are all ahead of Turkey.

Turkey had around 26.4 million Internet users in 2009, with 35 percent of them considered active users.

(Source: www.hurriyetdailynews.com )