I was mildly surprised a few weeks ago to read that Turkey is one of the fastest growing markets for social media powerhouses MySpace and Facebook. Unfortunately, the Web 2.0 craze hasn’t caught just the attention of Turkish teenagers and twentysomethings. Censorious government officials and humourless judges in Turkey are spooked about the influence of Web 2.0  applications. A jittery judge has just recently ruled Slide, the popular photo-sharing outfit, must be shut down for insulting the good name of Attaturk, I wrote in a Times’ Mousetrap post this morning. The official charge? “Harboring pictures and articles that are considered to be insulting to Ataturk.”

There is an upside to outright bans, of course. Slide operates in a massively competitive segment of the Web 2.0 market. A shutdown by a repressive regime gets it noticed. As Slide says on its blog, “Slide joins several other popular web services such as YouTube,
Facebook and MySpace that have been banned in various countries
(including Turkey, Pakistan, China and the UAE) for user-generated
content.”

Not bad company.

– Bernhard