WordPress is banned in select countries across the world (China and Pakistan, for example) but now Turkey has joined the ranks and become the latest country to ban WordPress domains being accessed by their population. How on earth did this happen, you may be wondering? Well, it all started when a movement to ban a single WordPress blog post was approved – only instead of banning just the post in question, many Turkish ISPs banned WordPress in its entirety…that’s a lot more than one blog post!
The post that was singled out seems a strange choice – one professor accused another professor of plagiarism. Not the most controversial topic in the world but the ban was passed, stating that: ‘If the access to the single page cannot be possible due to technical reasons, block access to wordpress.com’, which is where the full ban has come from.
There’s no word on if or when Turkish residents will be able to access WordPress.com blogs and it’s certainly an interesting development worth keeping an eye on, provoking numerous debates across tech websites as to what constitutes freedom of speech and whether governments should have the power to limit what their population can access online. The Daily Dot has published a fascinating post on the topic, for anybody who wants to find out more information about the ban and the impact it’s had on the WordPress community.