Doğan News Agency
Oluşturulma Tarihi: Kasım 26, 2008 00:00
MUĞLA - Despite being banned, the video-sharing site YouTube remains as one of the most popular Web sites in Turkey, with many, including the prime minister, finding ways to get around the ban imposed by courts.
According to the www.alexa.com Web site that categorizes the popularity of over 100 million sites, YouTube is the tenth most visited site in Turkey. Google Turkey, Face Book and Google are the most popular websites. According to alexa.com, more than a million Internet users in Turkey visit the Web site every day.
Two courts ordered YouTube banned in response to videos that it deemed insulting to Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey. Under Turkish law, it is a crime to insult Atatürk. However, surfers can still use proxy servers such as vtunnel or ninjacloak to enter blocked sites by hiding their IP address.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan surprised everybody when he said last Thursday that he could access YouTube, despite the ban. Erdoğan said he watched the ceremony of the main opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP, in which headscarf-wearing women became members of the party, on YouTube. When the reporters reminded him of the ban, "I can access (YouTube), you do it, too," he replied. Just be entering "YouTube'a nasıl girilir?" (How to enter Youtube?) or "YouTube'a girmenin yolları" (Ways to enter YouTube) in google or yahoo search engine, up come hundreds of thousands of results.