Turkish here.<p>This is unbelievable, but totally expected from the current "democractic" government. Social media usage is very high in Türkiye and people are coordinating using social media (mainly Twitter) for rescue operations in near realtime.<p>I'm pretty much sure some people will literally die under wreckage because of communication interruptions as the result of this block.<p>(For anyone telling to use VPN, yeah, many people are used to using VPN because of these blocks which also happened in the past, but not everyone is tech savvy and it's not reliable for life-or-death situations.
I live in Turkey and was very close to the earthquake epicenter. I can say that communication in affected cities is very limited and Twitter had a real positive effect on organizing help and reaching out to lots of people in the area.<p>So blocking Twitter right now is pure evil. They are only interested in the optics and looking strong for the upcoming election and do not care about anything else.<p>I saw some people waiting for their relatives to get rescued around collapsed buildings dare to say that they haven't received any official help so far in the news. And they said that "government can come and arrest me for saying this - so be it". I don't think the Turkish government is reading HN but still feeling a little bit anxious while posting this after witnessing so many weird things here.
Erdogan's first speech was almost 2 days after the earthquake and he said "We are monitoring who said what on the social media and tried to provoke the people. Today it's not the day to go after those but we take notes and when the day comes, we will go after them".<p>Just look at his face when delivering this speech: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doy38aKbMw4">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doy38aKbMw4</a><p>It's like from V for Vendetta. The lighting choice is very particular.<p>Twitter was heavily used to seek help by people in turmoil, even hundreds of people were posting from under the rubbles. The officials were claiming that everything was under control and they are helping everyone but people were posting videos showing the situation on the ground and the situation didn't look even close to being under control.<p>The head of communications of Erdogan even introduced an app to streamline "reporting disinformation". Like, it's the second day after a massive earthquake and they published a f*king app to snitch people.
Here is the announcement of the app, early at 05:00 local time in the morning 24 hours after the quake: <a href="https://twitter.com/fahrettinaltun/status/1622777204852592640/photo/1" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/fahrettinaltun/status/162277720485259264...</a><p>Also there were many incidents of the mainstream media cutting of talks or turning away the camera when people said or did anything discrediting the official narrative.<p>Yesterday, some people with prominent accounts who shared the tweets from the people in the region began reporting that they were taken into custody by the police. I guess the day has come quickly.
Unfathomable. People were literally live tweeting "save me" from under the rubble with their locations, and other people were tagging the disaster management account.
Insane. Developers are trying to make the best use of Twitter.<p>* <a href="https://huggingface.co/deprem-ml" rel="nofollow">https://huggingface.co/deprem-ml</a><p>* <a href="https://deprem.io" rel="nofollow">https://deprem.io</a><p>* <a href="https://deprem.basarsoft.com.tr" rel="nofollow">https://deprem.basarsoft.com.tr</a><p>* <a href="https://go.ahb.app/guvenliharita" rel="nofollow">https://go.ahb.app/guvenliharita</a><p>* <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1QpICWDVpd3eIScSvajnMXg45YrTOS7A&ll=36.241283100536464%2C36.9957036773029&z=9" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1QpICWDVpd3eIScSvaj...</a><p>* <a href="https://depremenkaz.xyz" rel="nofollow">https://depremenkaz.xyz</a><p>Almost all the info listed on these websites coming from twitter.
You should realize that Twitter had become a critical source of information about people in collapsed buildings. Their friends, family and relatives were writing detailed address information in order to help rescue efforts and reach these people faster.<p>All sorts of resource requests were also part of these tweets, so it is also part of understanding priorities for each affected area.<p>There are already software projects collecting this information, organizing them to a structured form and carrying them over to rescue authorities.
Words fail me! This is a serious impediment to search & rescuer efforts as well as coordination for money and other donations. The pretext given for the closure was that Twitter owed money to the Turkish government.<p>You can see the anger of locals where a mob reacts to Minister of Transportation’s visit: <a href="https://youtube.com/shorts/B7t9W7Qgpfs?feature=share">https://youtube.com/shorts/B7t9W7Qgpfs?feature=share</a><p>WhatsApp isage is ubiquitous in Turkey but it seems this morning people are seeing problems with that, too.
This is just pure evil. The government so far was pretty much useless; and with this they are now actively preventing people from organizing themselves. A net negative, after years of paying taxes.<p>And probably the greatest contributor to this tragedy was the lack of oversight for construction codes and safety regulations in the first place.<p>1- Cause thousands of preventable deaths 2- dont even try to help 3- impede those who are trying to help. This is a new low, even for the president.
Many hours after the quake hit, he came out of wherever he was, poured out all his hatred, threats, and then went right back in. He has the complete authority over everything in the country yet no accountability in anything ever. And his stares; effing evil!
As a Turkish person, seeing people tweet under rubbles, hardly breathing but found some space to tweet their full address, THIS IS UNBELIEVABLE. And THIS IS MURDER.<p>There are still people who are alive under rubbles with still some charge left on their phone. Twitter proved to be one of the most effective ways to communicate how severe their situation was.
You don't want people talking about who is responsible for bad construction and incompetent services right after a big disaster, do you? People might lose trust in the government </s>
Wow, this is eerily similar to what happened in India during second wave of COVID. Tweets complaining about oxygen shortage or handling of Covid in general were restricted in India.<p>It’s just weird why some governments do that. Playing down the crisis just delays the recovery efforts.<p>Source - 1) <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-56883483.amp" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-56883483.amp</a> 2) <a href="https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/recode/22410931/india-pandemic-facebook-twitter-free-speech-modi-covid-19-censorship-free-speech-takedown" rel="nofollow">https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/recode/22410931/india-pande...</a>
democracy is pretty hard in Turkey: just a small example: Bedia Özgökçe Ertan was elected as mayor of Van, then sentenced to 30 years of prison just for what she said.
This is why we need an open source alternative that communities can use to self-organize and recover after disasters: <a href="https://qbix.com/blog/2019/03/08/how-qbix-platform-can-change-the-world/" rel="nofollow">https://qbix.com/blog/2019/03/08/how-qbix-platform-can-chang...</a><p>The future of decentralization: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzMm7-j7yIY">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzMm7-j7yIY</a><p>Otherwise all we have is outrage at governments and corporations, but they have all the power and all the software too.
Despite a 1999 warning that killed 17-18K, rampant corruption, incompetence and neglect have not improved construction standards, despite the promise to do so. That means that the vast majority of today's deaths were preventable.<p>Imagine being accountable to that. Better to call it "misinformation".
I am not here to defend twitter block however considering topic filled with political comments i want to fix some misunderstanding.
Twitter is used as alternative channel yet critical for organization of volunteers . They say their operation hit by 70%. However people first ask help from official channel than seek alternatives arriving twitter as first option.
Saying that people asking help under rubble from twitter is straight out political comment. Block happened like 65+ hours after earthquake. 95%+ of rescue operation runs over official channel.
At this point is not that important anymore but I have never seen single tweet that points out you should shut down your phone in area so people under rubble have better change of reception. Which is insane.
Volunteers going there complaining phone/internet not working properly not aware they are potentially blocking people under rubble from access to phone yet complaining about twitter ban.
I am not defending block nor underestimating damage to volunteer organization (about distribution of help) just attempting to balance against political comments.
By the way twitter block is lifted again.
There is/was an active disinformation campaign on Twitter attempting to link the earthquake to Türkiye denying Nato expansion. The ridiculous conspiracy theory is that the US used a HAARP system to cause the earthquake in retaliation.<p>Not saying that's the reason for the ban, but twitter is not solely a force for good here.
At any other time this would have been more proof that Erdogan is blatantly authoritarian. However right now there is a lot of insidious fake news and disinfo on Turkish twitter. Many newly created bot accounts are pushing lies about Ukrainian refugees in Turkey, that they were hoarding aid intended for earthquake victims and stealing from the bodies of the dead. Twitter seems to be the only major social media platform that is not removing and banning these insidious lies and bot accounts.<p>Many Turkish people are instead using Facebook to organize help and aid efforts and it's more effective than twitter because even small towns already have Facebook Groups and Pages.
Not to defend Erdogan by any means (passionately despise him as much as I despise Putin), but truth be told - handing to and relying on unbiased/factual information dissemination, via Twitter, in the Musk era, is something highly questionable.
Just like in China with the anti-lockdown protests. The people who are recognisable on social media posts from the protests have all been arrested by now. They waited just long enough to make people forget about it before they picked them up one by one.
This is playbook of scumbag tyrants, doesn't matter if Putin, Erdogan or similar. I for sure hope EU politicians are taking a note too, there are 2 existential threats to democratic free Europe long term - Russia and Turkey. Both have same ambitions, are on completely opposite side of all crucial values free world holds dear.<p>Luckily their competence severely lags behind their ambitions, to think Turkey was for some time considered to join EU... I think Ataturk would be heavily depressed if he witnessed present day Turkey and its leaders.
Reading the comments, I fully support return of Caliphate and saying hello to Europeans like old time. This will eventually looking more and more feasible.
Off-topic, but threads like this make me lose hope in the West. The vast bulk of upvoted comments are deranged InfoWars-style conspiracy theories about multiple foreign countries that are deemed acceptable to spew hatred about. On a supposedly intellectual forum. If HN rules were uniformly applied, this thread would be nuked from orbit, because it is full of uncurious bile. But, because it is popular, there isn't really anything HN will do about it.<p>Can't we have a mature conversation about the nuances of censorship during severe crises without resorting to blatant xenophobia?
Understandable. Turkey ruling elites protecting country from possible chaos and hysteria amplified by social media. Twitter is still US based company and if asked would not turn back on US national security interests. As history shows, US tactic is to destabilize countries and make them weak, there is no better tool than social media platform like Twitter. To use Twitter right now and to take advantage of this horrible natural disaster and try to destabilize the country, is probably the easiest and best intelligence serviceman from Washington can do. This is just theory.