Turkey bans YouTube, again

YouTube has once again found itself banned from Turkey for having clips available that insult the first president and founding father Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, marking the second time in less than a year that the popular video sharing website has been banned in Turkey for the same reason. In March 2007, the site was banned for two days until the offending videos were taken down.

This comes as a blow to freedom of speech in Turkey, but it is not the only country which has blocked access to YouTube for similar reasons. Last year, Thailand blocked access to the site for almost four months because of video clips that were deemed offensive to the Thai monarch, and in May Morocco blocked access to YouTube over videos that criticized Morocco’s treatment of west Saharan Africans.