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.

"Those who apply for the filtering system will be asked to pick from one of three available categories: children, family and domestic. Those who do not apply for the new system can continue using the current system as usual."

Turkey blocks, or has blocked, thousands of sites and services. These include file-sharing tool Rapishare, YouTube, Vimeo and a number of Google properties, including Docs and Books.

Turkey also blocks 138 words from being used in domain names. These include "animal," "beat," "escort," "homemade," "hot," "nubile," "free," "teen," "pic," (bastard in Turkish), "got" (ass), "Haydar," (mans name but also means penis), "gay," "çıplak" (naked), "itiraf" (confession), "liseli" (high school student), "nefes" (breath) and "yasak" (forbidden).

Thanks to Alicia Eler for this news. | Istanbul photo by eutrophication&hypoxia.

"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.)

Turkey blocks domain names. Turkey has listed 138 words that cannot be used in domain names. Any website that opens in Turkey using one of these words will be shut down. The words include "animal," "beat," "escort," "homemade," "hot," "nubile," "free," "teen," "pic," (bastard in Turkish), "got" (ass), "Haydar," (mans name but also means penis), "gay," "çıplak" (naked), "itiraf" (confession), "liseli" (high school student), "nefes" (breath) and "yasak" (forbidden). Yes. The word forbidden is forbidden.

Burma bans Skype, trashes Internet cafes. The Burmese leadership banned Skype and other VOIP services and have sent Bureau of Special Investigation officers into Internet cafes to tell owners not to provide VOIP at their establishments.

Bahrain renews state of emergency. Bahrain has kept its "emergency" status to enforce a greater repression of expression and assembly in the wake of the March protests.

Vietnam jails sentences another blogger. Vi Duc Hoi, a blogger and democracy activist, has been sentenced to a five-year term in prison. The CPJ counts six bloggers currently imprisoned in the southeast Asian country.

Azerbaijani Facebook user denied bail. Bahthiyar Hajiev, a former opposition politician, was arrested for a show trial because he called for protests on Facebook and posted videos condemning the last set of elections in his country. He has been charged with "desertion." Despite being beaten and threatened with rape, the "judge" in the case refused his attorney's request to hear witnesses in Haijev's treatment.

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.

A group of Islamists have been targeting persons they find offensive and using this method to silence them. Fabrice has been a target a couple of times. See the latest below, where he was blocked automatically. He wrote to Axten after this happen and Facebook acknowledged that, "(i)t's possible there was a mistake." Well, that's one way to put it. If it's a mistake it has a long history now of being consistently made. It may well be that it is a negative effect of Facebook's crowd-sourced block policy. More on the background from ReadWriteWeb and ReadWriteWeb France (in translation from the French).

The Facebook page devoted to targeting people for blocking

Turkey sentences student to year in jail for Facebook. "The 4th Magistrate Criminal Court in Eskişehir in north-western Turkey sentenced 22-year-old Erdem Büyük to imprisonment of 11 months because the university student posted a caricature of Büyükşehir Mayor Yilmaz Büyükerşen on the social networking website Facebook." The U.S. notion of the offended party in a libel suite needing to prove malice, and guilt, is rare globally. The court deferred the sentence for five years. If the student commits a similar crime, the sentence will begin. A pretty clever way to ensure cooperation.

Facebook users in Columbia use the social networking site for violence. Antanas Mockus, a candidate for president in Columbia, and Jerome Uribe, the son of the current president, have both been issued death threats via Facebook. A Facebook page called "I promise to kill Antanas Mockus before the 30th of May" has been shut down and Colombian anti-terror police are investigating.

China to force all internet users to register names before posting. "A report in yesterday's issue of China Daily quotes Wang Chen, the minister of the State Council Information Office, as saying the authorities were 'exploring an identity authentication system' for users of online forums. Internet users are currently required to register before posting comments on these site but they can use a pseudonym to post. Wang said that, after preventing anonymous posting on major news portals and commercial websites, the aim now was to extend the system to online forums and chat websites.

Thailand interrogates U.S. citizen, and the U.S. government allows it. "Anthony Chai, an American citizen from California, was interrogated by Thai officials in Thailand and again later in the U.S. for allegedly insulting the monarchy in 2006. Originally from Thailand, Chai was granted US citizenship in the late 1970s. He faces possible arrest if he returns to Thailand...In 2006, Thai officials also contacted the company who hosted the website where comments about the Thai king were traced to Chai's business computer. It is believed that Chai's IP address was provided by the web hosting company without his knowledge. In response, the U.S.-based hosting company shut down the website." Thailand uses lese majeste laws to harass opponents.

U.S. state of Washington okays library censorship. "A Washington state supreme court issued a decision...supporting a public library's decision to fully filter Internet content, stating that such filtering could be considered 'collection development.'" This could provide a precedent for a library developing a collection that excluded, say, a political party or historical material on slavery.

Chávez's Twitter reaches almost 350,000. After calling it "terrorism," the Venezuelan president's three week-old Twitter account now has just shy of 350K followers. Number one with a bullet in Venezuela. Chávez has never been known as a big fan of conversation - more of making pronunciamientos- so Twitter doesn't seem like it will loosen him up much, especially given he follows only five accounts: a pro-Chávez newspaper, two political allies, his own party and of course Fidel Castro.

Russia arrests Islamic convert blogger. "Ethnic Russian convert to Islam Alexei Dudko was arrested around May 5 and has been kept locked, away from lawyers and relatives. His blog was mainly focusing on the events in Ingushetia in the North Caucasus, but also general events in Russia attracted his attention. He kept his real name in strict secret and, according to some sources, his arrest came days after his name somehow surfaced in the internet. Needless to say, that the person was very critical of the Russian authorities."

Britain finds Twitter bomb joker guilty. "Paul Chambers, who Monday was found guilty of tweeting 'a message by means of a public electronic message that was grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character contrary to the Communications Act 2003.'" He was fined 1,000 pounds and now has a criminal record, for Tweeting he would bomb his local airport if it didn't get its act together and clean up the runway in a week so he could visit his girlfriend. Stupid, but deemed non-threatening by the security personnel of the airport in question.

Yemen sentences online editor to year in jail. "The former editor of the Sanaa Press website and owner of the newspaper Al-Tajdid, Al-Leswas was convicted by Judge Mansur Al-Sha'e of the Sanaa special court for press and publication offenses on 2 May for articles about alleged corruption within the Al-Bayda province power company...On 3 May, the day after the trial, the Mukhabarat (intelligence services) arrested Abdelsalam Mutabaq, the editor of the Al-Bayda Press website, for calling for Al-Leswas' release. After being held in a Mukhabarat detention centre, he was transferred to Al-Bayda's main prison. " Al-Leswas has fought harassment for years. He's a brave guy. Anyone who works in journalism in Yemen can be nothing less.

Uzbekistand tries to erase the Andijan massacre. Five years ago President Islam Karimov ordered Uzbeki government troops to murder hundreds of protesters in the city of Andijan. They subsequently ejected all foreign journalists for writing about it, purged domestic journalists - even sending the president's nephew, journalist Dzhamshid Karimov to a mental hospital - and blocked websites, which are still unavailable.

Cuba reduces blogger's sentence. Diana Virgen García was arrested and sentenced, in one day, to almost two years in prison for blogging. Her sentence was reduced to a fine of $12.

Egypt bans Skype. There has been a "government ban, announced in March but mostly unnoticed until this week, on using Skype, the popular Internet phone program." Egypt's mobile phone carriers are prohibited from hosting Skype.

Gizmodo warrant unsealed. The media suite to unseal the warrant used to seize computers and paperwork in the iPhone case has been successful.

Kuwait arrests blogger/journalist. "Muhammad 'Abd al-Qader al-Jasem voluntarily turned himself in to State Security officials on Monday, after being informed that a warrant for his arrest had been prepared." Kuwait's Prime Minister Al Sabah has filed five defamation complaints against him in court and another person close to the PM filed another 10. Smacks of harassment. Al-Jasem was on bail on appeal for a six month sentence for defamation. He said he would not stop posting his articles.

Indian blogger arrested. K.V. Shine was arrested in Kerala state for "denigrating the Nair community especially the Nair women." Sounds like a tool, for sure. But arrests of this nature make arrests for outright political goals much, much easier.

Facebook screen shot from Fabrice Epelboin
Mockus photo from Smoreno2007
Arabic script all that is left from Sanaa Press

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.

The virtual protest uses Google Docs' "anyone can edit" function. Each protester is able to edit the document and put her or himself on the map. Our source tells us that since the map can be edited by anyone, "it also becomes a social game, with people moving and editing others' position."

See the protest in action here. Users around the world are invited to join in and express their support for Turkish Web users and their disapproval of Internet censorship. The goal for the number of protesters is apparently 1 billion; we certainly hope that this goal can be reached and that - more importantly - this seemingly simple stunt will send a strong message to governments that restrict their citizens' Web access.

• The Turkish population on Facebook is estimated to exceed 2.1 million, which places Turkey just behind the USA, UK, and Canada, and ahead of English-speaking Australia.
• 10 out of the 150 most active applications on Facebook are in non-English languages. 1 is in Spanish, the other 9 are in Turkish.
• There are 6 non-English apps in the first 10 pages of the Recently Popular list - they are all in Turkish.

Further, some of Facebook's fascinating visitor numbers coming out of ComScore and other web metric firms come from the Turkish effect. I had the chance to ask Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about it at the Crunchies event, and he agreed that Turkey was having an effect on Facebook's traffic. This is actually a threat for Facebook. Because if non-English speakers dominate an entire network, it could lead to the alienation of the existing user base, similar to what happened with Orkut in its early days. Honor Gunday, the founder of one the largest social networks in Turkey, Zurna, enviously calls this "Orkutization."

Secondly, this investment in Yonja is not the only success we've heard about lately out of Turkey. As Mike Butcher recalls, cember.net was recently acquired by the European business networking leader Xing. This is actually a rather big move, because while LinkedIn has a very strong position in America, they have zero presence in other locations. LinkedIn might be fast being erased by Xing's global expansion. In a global, connected world, that's not a good sign for LinkedIn. And note that Xing is already a public company. So if LinkedIn delays an exit a little more, it may lose its advantageous position, even in the US. In other words, I'm not as optimistic about LinkedIn as our own Bernard Lunn. A small delay may make us call LinkedIn, LinkedInDust.

Similarly when you take a look at Alexa's ranking of Ning's biggest networks, you see that they are either adult-oriented or Turkish. So Ning is being nourished by Turkish traffic as well.

Last but not least, Turkey's high potential in social networking comes from its very young demographics. The number of young people in Turkey exceeds even the most populated countries in Europe. Moreover, the Internet penetration is quite high, and similar to Brazilians, Turkish people have very social characteristics; Turkey was the 2nd biggest market for Live Messenger, after all.

As for Mike's question, some influential people behind the world's most popular social networks come from Turkey. To name a couple, the founder of Orkut and the project manager of Windows Live are Turkish. So, "what is it about Turkey," is not actually the right type of question, although I can understand Mike, because Turkey is generally still a market in the dark, awaiting more exploration.