While Turkey Twitters Away

Hoping to encourage a functional, friendly state in the Middle East, Western powers were once largely receptive to the image of Turkey as a model democracy, with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at the helm. Overlooked was Erdoğan’s disturbing tendency to crush his domestic opponents: hundreds of senior military officers who could have disrupted his rule were imprisoned, newspaper editors and journalists were detained frequently, and concerns about the treatment of minorities were largely dismissed.

Now those unnoticed concerns have come to the fore: Erdoğan, struggling to survive an anti-corruption inquiry that has already resulted in the resignations of three of his cabinet members and could cost his AKP party the next election, has taken the outrageous step of blocking Twitter across the entire country. This move comes after widespread sharing of leaked recordings, which allegedly feature Erdoğan instructing his son to hide vast sums of money.

“We will wipe out Twitter. I don’t care what the international community says,” the prime minister said at a campaign rally just hours before the ban went into effect. The prime minister also threatening to do the same to Facebook and YouTube unless they take up an “honest attitude.”

The prime minister’s government should not be allowed to suppress a news outlet, or especially an entire media platform, simply because it embarrasses him or his administration. Such a standard not only represents an unacceptable assault on the freedoms of speech and an unfettered press that are so essential to a democracy, but also could be easily exploited by the next Turkish government against Erdoğan and his allies.

For a man who was once banned from holding public office and almost disallowed from running for prime minister because of his affiliation with banned Islamist parties, Erdoğan seems remarkably unaware of this disturbing drawback.

The Turkish authorities have responded to the criticisms of the White House, European Union, and press groups like the Committee to Protect Journalists with the assertion that the censorship is legal under Turkish law. While that may be true—the Turkish parliament passed a bill vastly expanding the government’s control over the Internet last month—any law that legitimates the suppression of free speech is corrosive to the free exchange of ideas that is so necessary for any democracy.

Until that overreach is corrected, Turkish-style democracy might not be much to aspire to.