From Mashable
There’s electioneering, and then there’s what Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Thursday on the campaign trail.
“We will eradicate Twitter,” Erdoğan told a rally in Bursa in the west of the country. “I don’t care what the international community says. Everyone will witness the power of the Turkish Republic.” There are roughly 10 million Twitter users based in Turkey.
To drive the point home, Erdoğan added: “Twitter, mwitter!” — although there appears to be some dispute about how to translate that — it’s either a “semantically empty phrase” or an indication that Erdoğan will shut down Twitter and similar websites.
What happened next was no laughing matter. The Prime Minister’s office issued a statement saying that Turkish officials had “no option” other than to ban Twitter, according to Reuters.
Shortly afterwards, tweets and screenshots began to show that Twitter (and possibly also Facebook) was being blocked in Turkey, as of 4:30pm ET
