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Twitter complies with Turkey's 'national security' blackout demand – BLOCKS newspaper's tweets

Refuses to kill account

Turkey has once again browbeat Twitter into censoring some of the content posted on the micro-blogging site, after being threatened with an outright ban in the country.

The demand came after the Turkish government issued a court order in Adana on Thursday. According to the New York Times, officials had told news organisations to cease reporting on a military police raid on spooks' trucks that had been destined for Syria in January 2014.

It's been claimed that the vehicles were loaded with weapons for extremists to attack the Syrian regime, which is led by President Bashar al-Assad.

However, the Turkish government has vehemently denied the allegations and said that the trucks were transporting humanitarian aid to the country.

A partially redacted document (PDF) on the Chilling Effects website revealed details of the court order.

Turkey argued that revealing details of the police raid, after documents of legal proceedings relating to the story were leaked online, could damage national security.

Following the court order, Twitter, Facebook and Google – whose chiefs frequently claim to strongly support freedom of expression across the world – complied with the demands by removing posts from accounts that linked to the documents.

However, the Turkish government led by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan – who has previously labelled social networks a "menace to society" – has since lashed out at left-wing newspaper Halkın Gazetesi BirGün for continuing to share details of the raid with its 336,000 Twitter followers via its @BirGun_Gazetesi account.

The NYT reported that Twitter had hit the censorship button on specific tweets on Halkın Gazetesi BirGün's account, but refused to kill its access to the service. ®

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