Turkey and Social Media

Today's Wall Street Journal has an article by Emre Peker and Sam Schechner, Turkey Briefly Blocks YouTube, Twitter Access  that describes an action by a court in Instanbul to remove information about a terrorist hostage situation from sites operated by U.S. and Turkish companies, including ISPs, Facebook, and others.  We have a hard time understanding the significance of an event like this because a few people still believe the Internet is totally free from censorship.  They should know better.  

Turkey is not alone in censoring the Internet both in their country and outisde of it.  Russia, China, Iran and a handful of others actively try to influence the content of their Internet by filtering on keywords, controlling their press, hacking press sources in other countries, influencing thought leaders, and political officials.  What Turkey did here is considerably short of that.  

The world leaders have yet decide how much of the Internet needs to be managed and how much should be "free".  This isn't a simple thing with the kinds of crime going on the Internet.  Child porn has seen a huge upswing, drug distributors now use web sites, and money laundering tries to use electronic substitutes for currency.  Every time we turn around, somebody is stealing privacy information used to steal money from our economy.  Countries can barely keep up with crime, and have some difficulty with managing information coming into and out of their own countries.  Yet, what Turkey did here is only the beginning of a public acknowledgement that the Internet is not free everywhere in the world.  The term used to describe what is happening is "balkanization", meaning the Internet is no longer a single thing that reaches into the core of any country in the world.  It is being subdivided into regions and countries that don't necessarily agree with the West on how the Internet should be used.  

Don't confuse managing information with control of the medium of use.  Countries control television, radio and can monitor telephones and computers, but they cannot control them.  They make it painful for people who disagree, like Ilya Ponomarev who was described in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece today as the living example of why you don't want to vote against Putin in the Duma.  He is arrested, characterized as a criminal, charged with a number of crimes he probably didn't commit, and had his immunity stripped from him so he could be prosecuted.  The rest won't go well for him.  The Russians did the same to Ukrainian leaders who backed actions against them.  What the Russians are doing is manufacturing information which is then picked up by Interpol, newspapers, and their own press corps, and becomes news of their own making.  They are not controlling the Internet, but they are influencing the content it disseminates.  Truth does not matter to them.  

What Turkey did was far from what the Russians and Chinese are doing to control the information that their populations get to see.  I don't think I mind that they do that, until of course, they decide they want to manage our information too.  Hacking our newspapers, our government, and major businesses is allowing them to have access to the thoughts of business and government leaders who have to make decisions about how they are going to handle relations with the White House and our largest industries.  Today, the White House admited again that it was hacked and they still haven't gotten it under conbtrol.  They can't seem to learn that the Internet, however careful people like Hillary Clinton may think they are being, is not a safe place and you can't treat it like one.