Turkey: PM Attacks Facebook For Lack Of Censorship

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan criticized Thursday the social networking website of Facebook for the lack of censorship over the unethical material published on it.

Erdgoan said, at a mass rally held in the midwestern province of Balikesir in preparation for general elections, that that Facebook represents, “an ugly technology,” because anyone can publish immoral material on the website without censorship or moral restraint.

He added that, “Facebook pages are ugly and disgraceful as well,” calling for caution against the website content which he described as a reflection of the ugly face of technology.

In spite of such potshots taken by Turkish PM, Erdogan himself has a Facebook page that is being regarded as one of the most favorite pages used by the website users who hit 777,000 subscribers to Erdogan’s personal webpage.

Facebook is one of the most famous websites all over the globe with its number of subscribers exceeding 500 million including world leaders and heads of governments.

However, Erdogan’s brickbats come amid a nip and tuck electoral race between him and Turkey’s opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu against the backdrop of an e-mail sent by a minister from Erdogan’s government through the Web to a high-profile governmental functionary asking the latter to fulfil some personal demands for the minister.

Erdogan refuted such accusation, saying that such alleged e-mail is a fake that was sent by an unknown person, and not the minister, while finding fault with Turkish media outlets for overstating the whole matter, and misrepresentation of news.