This is something we addressed recently in Internet: Restricted Access: A Critical Assessment of Internet Content Regulation and Censorship in Turkey.

Turkish Daily News: Banned YouTube still in Top 10

November 26, 2008 Wednesday

Despite being banned, the video-sharing site YouTube remains as one of the most popular Web sites in Turkey, with many, including the prime minister, finding ways to get around the ban

According to the www.alexa.com Web site that categorizes the popularity of over 100 million sites, YouTube is the tenth most visited site in Turkey

Google Turkey, Face Book and Google are the most popular websites.

According to alexa.com, more than a million Internet users in Turkey visit the site

Two courts ordered YouTube banned in response to videos that it deemed insulting to Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. Under Turkish law, it is a crime to insult Ataturk. However, surfers can still use proxy servers such as vtunnel or ninjacloak to enter blocked sites by hiding their IP address. The irony highlights the legal system’s mistreatment of the medium and lack of technical knowledge

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan surprised everybody when he said last Thursday that he could access YouTube, despite the ban. Erdogan said he watched the ceremony of the main opposition Republican Peoples Party, or CHP, in which headscarf-wearing women became members of the party, on YouTube

When the reporters reminded him of the ban. “I can access (YouTube), you do it, too,” he replied

Just be entering “YouTube’a nasil girilir?” (How to enter Youtube?) or “YouTube’a girmenin yollari” (Ways to enter YouTube) in google or yahoo search engine, up come hundreds of thousands of results, showing just how hard it is to censor the Internet in the information age