TURKEY’S GOVERNMENT BLOCKS ACCESS TO TWITTER

Turkey restricted access to Twitter today hours after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened to “root out” the social media network where wiretapped recordings have been leaked, damaging the government’s reputation ahead of key local elections this month.

Many users trying to access the network today saw a notice from Turkey’s telecommunications authority, citing court orders for the site’s apparent closure.

Twitter spokesman Nu Wexler said the company was “looking into this now,” without saying whether an outage had occurred.

Twitter’s @policy account had sent out messages in both English and Turkish that users could send out tweets by using short message service, or “SMS.”