Turkey's Twitter 'Eradication' Lasted Two Weeks

Twitter is back in Turkey after a judge in the country ruled that the blocking the site was a violation of freedom of expression, ending a two-week ban of the site.

The ruling comes soon after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said that the country would “eradicate Twitter.”

Of course, the ban did nothing of the sort, as dark net traffic spiked and use of the social network actually grew by 138 percent after the ban was implemented. Meanwhile, an app that circumvented the ban quickly shot to the top of the app store.

If Erdogan was trying to get rid of the “scourge that is called Twitter,” he did a really bad job—now the site is more popular than ever and the ban has been lifted, so no fancy workarounds will be necessary to access it. Soon after the ban was lifted, journalists in the country tweeted that they were using the service without a VPN.

I am now tweeting from #Turkey without VPN. #TwitterBanLifted

— Alex Christie-Miller (@AChristieMiller) April 3, 2014

The court's decision comes just after the country's local elections this week, which kept Erdoğan's ruling party in power.

YouTube is however still banned in the country, with legal proceedings underway. US Ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe Daniel Baer said that the United States “urge[s] the Turkish government to act quickly to lift the blocks on all social media sites and to refrain from implementing such measures in the future.”

In any case, a court striking down any ban on social media is good news, and, in the meantime, a whole lot of people in the country just got a lesson on circumventing government censorship.