Turkey blocked access to Twitter Inc. nine days before local elections, as Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan acted on his vow to shut down leaks targeting his government amid a corruption probe.
The move was criticized both within Turkey and overseas, as users accessed Twitter via proxies and other work-arounds. President Abdullah Gul was one of them, posting to his Twitter account that the total ban of a social media platform “can’t be condoned” and that he hoped it wouldn’t last.
