WordPress Yields to Erdoğan

WordPress updates its takedown policy to reflect that it now complies with Turkish censorship demands – four months after I blogged the story

Last year, I reported about a Turkish political blog that was geo-blocked by WordPress following a takedown request from tyrannical Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

In a series of tweets, the Turkish journalist and noted Erdoğan critic, Mahir Zeynalov, questioned WordPress’ decision to censor the blog.

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The San Francisco-based blogging platform had previously stated that, without a U.S. court order, it refused to honour Turkish requests to censor content.

However, when I asked about the censored blog, a WordPress spokesperson said it had been forced to comply with demands from Turkey “or face a whole WordPress.com site block in the country,” but that it would “look into making the current process clearer in our next transparency report.”

Earlier this month, WordPress updated its takedown policy via its bi-annual transparency report:

During the previous reporting period, we changed our approach for takedown demands from Azerbaijan and Turkey. We now respond to them as we do the demands from Russia, which is why the percentage of requests where some or all content was removed has increased.

According to the report, for the period July 1–December 31, WordPress received 93 court orders and 235 requests from government agencies or law enforcement.

It complied with 66 percent of the total 328 requests, but refused to comply with some of the more absurd requests including a request from Colombian authorities to suspend six websites for “insulting and dishonorable comments against political figures in Colombia and imputing unfounded charges to people who generate business at the national level.”