Turkey has lifted its ban on social media channel Twitter, after Twitter complied with Turkey's request to remove photographs of a prosecutor held at gunpoint by far-left terrorists last week.
A official told Reuters on Monday that YouTube , which was also banned after an Istanbul court ordered social media to remove any content showing the kidnapped prosecutor, remained blocked late on Monday as talks with it continued. The ban on Facebook was lifted soon after it was imposed, when the offending photos were deleted.
Mehmet Selim Kiraz, the Istanbul prosecutor seen in the pictures, was later fatally wounded during a shootout last Tuesday between his two captors - who were also killed - and Turkish security forces.
On Wednesday, a female terrorist from the same group - the far-left Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C) - was shot dead as she attempted to attack Istanbul's police headquarters.
The deadly attacks sparked fears by rights groups in Turkey that the Islamist government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan would use them as an excuse to further crack down on dissent. Under Erdogan's AKP party Turkey has gained notoriety as the country with the highest number of imprisoned journalists, and protests against the government by opposition groups are regularly put down forcefully by police. Activists are regularly jailed simply for criticizing Erdogan.
Those fears appeared to have been realized Monday as Turkish internet users found themselves unable to access Facebook, Twitter or Youtube. The blanket ban was being billed as a response to disturbing images of Kiraz being held bound, blindfolded and at gunpoint during the hostage standoff, which were posted online by his captors as they issued their demands for his release.
Soon after their publication, a court order demanded authorities block 166 websites which allowed the images to be published, according to the Turkish Hurriyet daily.
On Monday, Hurriyet cited the head of the Information and Communications Technologies Authority (BTK), as saying that the ban on Facebook had been lifted soon after its implementation after the social networking giant removed the offending images.
Although the most comprehensive to date, this isn't the first ban on social media imposed by Turkey's AKP government.
In January, it blocked access to all sites which carried the front page of the French satirical magazineCharlie Hebdo, which featured a cartoon of Mohammed, following the massacre at the magazine's office by Muslim terrorists. That same month the government reportedly ordered the closure of all websites which published details of alleged Turkish arms transfers to Sunni Islamist rebels in Syria.
Last year, after briefly banning all access to Twitter, Erdogan himself vowed to "eradicate" the social media site.