TURKEY: CONTESTING TERRORIST USE OF THE INTERNET

UNCLAS ANKARA 006612 SIPDIS SENSITIVE SIPDIS STATE FOR EUR/PPD: JRICKERT E.O. 12958: N/A TAGS: OIIP KISL KPAO PTER SUBJECT: TURKEY: CONTESTING TERRORIST USE OF THE INTERNET REF: STATE 193515 ¶1. (SBU) Summary. There are very few websites in Turkey that fit the criteria outlined in reftel for use by the Digital Outreach Team. Overall, Internet usage in Turkey is relatively small. Arabic websites are not used in Turkey at all, as the lingua franca of Turkey is Turkish. English websites are also few and far between, as few Turks have the necessary level of English to function in an open forum on the Internet. End Summary. ¶2. (U) According to the Turkish State Statistics Institute, only twenty-one percent of Turks use the Internet regularly. As a consequence of this, the idea of blogging and/or posting comments on public websites has not caught on in the same way that it has in the rest of the Middle East or Europe. The closest Turkey comes to open forums on the internet are the websites of the major newspapers, which often allow for comments on stories. ¶3. (SBU) There are only two Turkish blog portals of note. One is http://www.blogcu.com/, which features a variety of blogs on everything from politics to love to philosophy. Milliyet, one of Turkey's leading newspapers, recently set up a blog portal of its own, http://blog.milliyet.com/. Both of these sites are in their infancy and, judging by the number of bloggers and comments, they are not visited very frequently by the general public. Conspiracy theories are a favorite topic of the few blogs that exist in Turkey. Two of the more extensive blogs dedicated to conspiracy theories are http://komploteorilerimiz.blogcu.com/ and http://teori.blogspot.com/ (both in Turkish). ¶4. (SBU) English language blogs and political websites on Turkey are few and far between. The ones that do exist are mainly located on US-based blog portals, and are maintained largely by Turkish-Americans. Most of the English language sites devoted to politics are merely compilations of Turkey-related stories from the western press. WILSON