WordPress.com Blocked in Turkey
Why We’re Blocked in Turkey: Adnan Oktar
There’s been quite a discussion going on in my personal blog about the fact that all of WordPress.com has been blocked by Turkey.
Lots of people, including us, are confused and indignant about this wholesale censorship. Last night we received a letter from the person claiming to be responsible for the block, which in the interest of the community I’m going to publish in its entirety here:
>Dear Sir,
>
>We have applied to you to remove the
>unlawful statements regarding my client
>Mr. Adnan Oktar (who is the author of
>the books written under the pen name
>Harun Yahya) in your blogs. The number
>of our attempts to inform and warn you
>regarding these defamation blogs must
>have been at least twenty, many times
>through your support page, a couple of
>times to your legal department and we
>even sent a regular mail to Mr. Matt
>Mullenweg. Most of our attempts were
>unanswered.
>
>These defamation blogs contained
>slanders to some of my client’s friends
>as well. They also applied WordPress.com
>support with their official ID cards and
>a representative directed them to write
>to the legal department. So they did but
>again no response from legal. So we have
>become obliged to apply to Turkish
>judicial courts to stop this defamation
>executed through your services. By the
>decision of Fatih 2nd Civil Court of
>First Instance, number 2007/195, access
>to WordPress.com has been blocked in Turkey.
>…So there you have it.
I’m curious, particularly amoung our Turkish community, what do you think we should do about this? How should we respond?
Good questions. As long as we’re on the topic I might as well plug an idea to solve their China censorship problem while they are considering how to solve their Turkey censorship problem.
It’s unfortunate to hear claims that WordPress.com hasn’t made any real effort to talk to these guys in Turkey, especially given the trouble they claim to have gone through, assuming their claims are true.
My experience with WordPress.com has been that they are pretty responsive, though there was one issue a few months back where I raised a bit of a stink and was pretty much ignored in the aftermath, though I did write to the parties involved. Maybe it’s time for the WordPress.com team (especially their forum volunteers moderators, who while are quite WordPress literate can be offensive and rude to those they disagree with, “I would think that bloggers were intellegent folks. Guess not.”) to get some professional training in conflict resolution?
Tags WordPress, Blogging, Censorship
August 20, 2007 at 8:30 am
Forum volunteers aren’t staff, do not represent wordpress.com or Automattic, have no official status and receive no professional training or guidance whatsoever. They’re just users, the same as you. The only reason they keep getting mistaken for staff is that they are often the only visible presence helping people on the forums.
I agree that staff should definitely get some training in how best to deal with their users (not to mention their volunteers), but I really can’t see it happening.
August 20, 2007 at 11:01 am
Forum volunteers do not officially represent WordPress.com or Automattic. They do, however, have some adminstrative control over forums and are in practice the face of WordPress.com in the minds of users.
August 20, 2007 at 3:36 pm
@kevin
Having spent over a year of faithfully volunteering for hours almost every day answering questions on the forum I’m hard pressed to understand what you mean by stating volunteers have some administartive control over the forums. This is simply not true.
We do not have ANY administrative tools. We cannot even mark resolved issues as being “resolved” when they are or move them to the correct forums when they are improperly posted. We do not have backend access to blogs. We do not have any prior knowledge of what features will be introduced and when that will take place. We do not know backend issues are “broken” and under “repair” and, we most certainly have no input into policy making.
Lest those who volunteer may be mistakenly perceived to be staff we continually make it clear that we are not. If the face of wordpress.com in the eyes of the users then it’s time for everyone to clean their glasses.
August 20, 2007 at 3:40 pm
edit: The last sentence above should read: “If volunteers are the face of wordpress.com in the eyes of the users, then it’s time for everyone to clean their glasses.”
August 20, 2007 at 4:06 pm
@brightfeather,
Good point. Not all forum volunteers have adminstrative control over the forums. Forum moderators, who are also volunteers, have some adminstrative control over the forums. Poor communication on my part.
August 20, 2007 at 4:09 pm
Gotta admit that my comment still stands. It’s troublesome to see someone post a question directly after the post where their question is answered or where they’re directed for help. This takes time and energy away from those who truely need assistance and requires the forum volunteers to go out of their way to restate the answer and point the poster to the post directly above theirs. This happens over and over again on a daily basis. We provide detailed instructions and directions but yet folks ignore them simple because they don’t want to completely read a thread.
Please understand that we do what we do to help folks. It’s doesn’t help when people can’t be bothered to read what’s in front of them.
You point at a perfect example of how Automattic staff has screwed over the forum volunteers as well. Instead of taking complaints about the feed stats, Matt closed the thread and directed folks to the forums where the posters directed their anger to the volunteers instead. We didn’t turn off the feed stats. We don’t have any control over them. We can’t help you. We do know who can and we directed folks to feedback. But yet we the forum volunteers continued to receive abuse and anger directed at us from the other end users. Time and time again we directed folks to feedback but yet few folks listened to us. It’s troublesome again where we tried to help folks just to be ignored and have that anger thrown at us, especially when there’s a lot of evidense that staff pretty much iognores the support forums anyway.
Think of it this way. Would you rather have the volunteers ignore these folks who post right behind their answer? That’s the only other option.
Instead of complaining, why not step up and try assisting in the forums? It would take the strain off the other forum volunteers and hopefully give you a chance to see for yourself what is occuring. Maybe you’ll understand the frustration we’ve gone through.
August 20, 2007 at 4:16 pm
Oh, and just for reference, the wp.com forum moderators have little adminstrative control on the forums. All we could do is delete posts and post them to the correct subforums. That’s it. Really just a fancy title.
August 20, 2007 at 4:21 pm
“It’s troublesome to see someone post a question directly after the post where their question is answered or where they’re directed for help.”
Perhaps the person didn’t read the post where their question is answered because they were busy posting the question that appeared directly after the answer. If this were the case, that person wouldn’t even see the answer until after they finished posting the question, in which case it may appear that the person “ignored them simply because they didn’t want to completely read the thread,” but in reality the person just didn’t see the answer until it was too late.
August 20, 2007 at 4:38 pm
Posting overlap isn’t coming into place here. They ignore the thread and the answer provided and then ask the same question over again. The answer that’s there for them to read before they’ve started their post. A quick two second scan of the thread would provide them their answer or point them to the correct place.
In the past we’ve had folks tell us specifically that they didn’t want to search or read through the previous threads to find their answer. That’s just lazyness.
You also have to remember that some of the volunteers have been doing this for nearly 2 years now. In that time we’ve never once received a simple ‘thank you’ from Automattic. Nothing. Heck some of us asked for a tshirt from the recent WordCamp only to be ignored by staff. A simple thank you and/or simple tshirt would have gone a long way. We’ve saved Automattic thousands of dollars sinc etheir startup covering their asses (being honest here) and we couldn’t even get a lousy tshirt out of them.
Also remember that my becoming the forum moderator was dropped into my lap with no staff member ever asking me if I wanted to become one. Nothing. There were some days I received nealy a hundred emails from other end users asking (and in fact sometimes demanding) my assistance. Again, many times without a simple thank you. All done for free so that Automattic could do whatever they were doing.
You want to know why I started answering questions in the forums? Because no one else was. I answered almost 50 of them the very first day. To be honest, I now wish I hadn’t.
You also make no mention either of folks being rude towards us. (Again perfect example was the feed stats issue) Many times abuse was thrown at us and we did our best to help folks.
Again, it’s easy for you to complain. It’s harder for you to understand. Maybe pitching in would help you see what we’ve gone through.
August 20, 2007 at 4:59 pm
I have had personal experience with posting overlap with you on the forums.
August 20, 2007 at 7:24 pm
*shrug* If you did then I apoligize although I don’t see why you’ve gone out of your way to call me rude because of it. (And considering that you don’t provide a link, I can’t give you a real answer.) If there was overlap on a post, I would have deleted my post or edited it. It happened on occasion but 99.9% of the time with the 5k+ threads over there, there was no overlap.
And considering you’ve ignoring a lot of what folks said above, I think you’re just proving my and other’s points.
August 20, 2007 at 11:42 pm
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August 22, 2007 at 3:56 am
Knowing a bit from the first hand experience with the Turkish judicial system and the bureaucracy , I blamed primarily the system in this ostensible minor event turning into a saga. It appears now that there is enough blame to go around including possibly the WP which I held blameless so far.
Perusing through some of the comments on the matter it appears that some of the commenters have an ax to grind with Adnan Oktar (a.k.a. Harun Yahya) . They make his an issue of creationism versus evolutionism, which it should not be. The position Matt seems to be taking is that it is a free exchange of information in the internet , as parti of fundamental right of free speech.
This is certainly a view held by many including myself in principle. However the matter gets a bit thorny when you get into the limits, boundaries of the exercise of such right. That is why we have caseloads before the courts dealing with issues such as slander, defamation, libel, trademarks, copyrights and so on, -some of which are involved in this case. I am not going to attempt to sort out all the legal and moral issues and heir ramifications in this case. All I am trying o do is to invite all concerned to differentiate between personal dislike for a person, or opposition to his views on certain matters and justice.
I understand the predicament Matt and WP finds themselves in. They see the issue as an undemocratic justice system and an individual with strong arming the system to demand immunity from criticism. They are taking a stand on the side of the free speech. I urge them however to go beyond that reflexive behavior and engage in a bit deeper analysis of what Edip Yuksel is doing , and whether he is going over the bounds vis-a-vis the free speech. He has made a name for himself for attacking various religious persons, institutions and values sacred to others. I do not contest his right to be wrong , but I am also cognizant of the fact that WP does render judgement on suitability of the content of the blogs. The method Edip Yuksel is employing , specifically targeting another individual, and inviting others to abuse the blogging system with multiple blogs directed at the same purpose should also be questioned. WP cannot judge the veracity of all accusations in millions of pages of content, however it can place certain limits such as selection of blog names etc, as it does in the terms of service it is offering. Edip Yuksel and others should also be mindful of the fact that they have the right to free speech but exercising it on WP is a privilege.
http://bekirlyildirim.wordpress.com/2007/08/21/wordpres-banned-in-turkey-a-case-of-throwing-the-baby-with-the-bath-water/
http://bekirlyildirim.wordpress.com/2007/08/21/wordpres-banned-in-turkey-a-case-of-throwing-the-baby-with-the-bath-water/