Blocking Twitter was mistake, says Turkey’s EU minister

ANKARA

Turkey made a mistake in blocking access to Twitter, its EU Minister Volkar Bozkır has said.

“I wish we had not closed Twitter. It was wrong. Everybody accessed [the site] anyway. Now we’re trying to restore a wrong perception [about Turkey],” Bozkır was reported by daily Haberturk as saying on Oct. 5.

Turkey blocked access to Twitter on March 20, hours after then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who became the president on Aug. 28, vowed to close down the social media platform, triggering both domestic and international reaction.

On April 3, the microblogging site was unblocked, 24 hours after the Constitutional Court ruled that the ban was a violation of free speech. The company now is now in talks to open a Turkey office.

Erdoğan admitted that he was “increasingly against the Internet every day,” according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), who met with the president in Ankara on Oct. 2.

In the same Haberturk interview, Bozkır also said Turkey does not have the luxury to announce that it does not need to be a full member of the European Union, stressing that the bloc is still a very big economic player.