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In August, we mentioned that Turkey had backed away from mandatory Internet filtering. The initial plan had required each Internet user to choose from one of four filtering plans. This was wildly unpopular with Turkey's influential and very secular nerds and cosmopolitan types, especially in the capitol of Istanbul.

Instead, a voluntary program is now live. The problem with this, of course, is that, given Turkey's recent history of censorship, any program limiting access to information bears watching.

Iran Officially Worst Online Oppressor. A new report from Freedom House has ranked Iran as the world's worst abuser of online rights.

"Freedom on the Net 2011" determined that the five worst countries for online freedom - based on obstacles to access, limits on content and violations of user rights - are Iran, followed by Burma, China, Cuba and Tunisia. (The last entry is certainly changed somewhat by the uprising earlier this year.)

As we wrote a couple of weeks ago, Facebook has a "crowd-sourced" way of handling complaints. If a certain number of users register complaints against another user, that user is automatically banned and his or her profile is locked down.

We were told by a public relations representative, Simon Axten, that "(t)he assumptions made in the blog post are false." (We weren't really assuming, but OK.) "We don't take any action on a user report until it has been investigated by our professional reviewers, and they have positively identified a violation of our policies." This is contradicted by the facts as we know them.

Internet users in Turkey have found an interesting visualization to highlight their numbers, connect with one another, air their grievances and hopefully reach their goals using Google Maps and shared documents.

A reader wrote to us tonight saying that his fellow citizens have been "struggling with cencorship for several years just like their Chinese counterparts. Prominent websites are banned in Turkey, such as youtube, lasf.fm and google pages mostly because of political reasons." In protest, many of people are virtually lining the streets using a shared interface, creating what is becoming a fascinating, non-violent and hopefully effective visualization.

TechCrunch's Mike Butcher reports about Turkish social network Yonja's $12.5 million worth of funding and asks, "What is it about Turkey?." As a Turkish native, I think I am the right person to answer that question and also, this can be an opportunity to shed some light on the latest intriguing developments at Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing, and Ning, as they relate to the European and world social networking markets.