Tyranny & the Web

Turkey likes to pretend it’s the beacon of democracy in the Middle East. Never mind that it regularly does things like ban YouTube and Twitter and threaten Google — most recently over an image of a masked militant holding a gun to the head of Mehmet Selim Kiraz, a Turkish prosecutor.

The rationale was a favorite of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government: Circulation of the photo was “propaganda for an armed terrorist organization and distressing to the prosecutor’s family.”

In the wake of the 2013 Taksim Square protests against the destruction of a popular park to build an Islamist monument, Erdogan called social media the “worst menace to society.” When people took to tweeting last March to share leaked audio recordings that seemed to implicate officials in a corruption investigation, he blocked Twitter.

The latest round of social media muzzling ended quickly — after people shifted to virtualprivate network ( VPN) services that route outofcountry to tweet hashtags like “bans don’t affect us” and “free social media without censorship.”

Erdogan made his aim clear last year: “Twitter and the rest, we will root out all of them. I don’t care what the international community says, they will see the power of the Republic of Turkey.”

Count it as another reminder — on top of Web censorship from Iran to China— ofwhy theUnited States must not give up its administration of the Internet, despite the Obama administration’s stated intent to do so.

Free speech — in the streets, and online — is too important.