Wordpress.com banned in Turkey

Less than a month after the Malaysian goverment cracked down on bloggers, the Wordpress.com domain has been banned in all of Turkey (*Wordpress.com is the hosted version of Wordpress).

From wired

Turkish millionaire, accused criminal and cult leader, anti-semite and anti-evolutionist Adnan Oktar didn’t like what was said about him on a few WordPress blogs. (This appears to be the only English-language blog).

So Oktar, who also goes by the name Harun Yahya, went to court. And the court decided that the best way to deal with the problem was to block all access to Wordpress.com in Turkey.

Now, I’m not familiar with Turkish libel law, so I won’t comment on the legal merits of the decision. Its general merits, on the other hand, are fair game, and there are none of these.

Wordpress blogs get around 12 million Turkish pageviews every month. For the courts to keep their citizens out of a large section of the public sphere just because a tiny bit of it is objectionable is asinine. It’s backwards and ignorant. Maybe that’s to be expected in a place where criticizing Turkishness is a crime, but still.

As for Oktar’s creationism, it’d be too easy — and unfair — to paint other evolution skeptics with the same brush. But anyone out there who’s actually using the Atlas of Creation — an 800-page textbook published by Oktar and distributed throughout Europe and the U.S. — as anything other than a doorjamb ought to take a hard look at where it came from.

Thanks to Chris over at SciAm for the heads-up. Here’s their coverage of the story.

You can read more about this on Wordpress