Just days before he was due to be selected as a contender for president of Turkey, Ekrem Imamoglu, the mayor of Istanbul from the secular Republican People’s Party (CHP), was arrested on March 19. Current President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has marked his 22 years in power by eroding the country’s democratic norms and rule of law, and it seems the Turkish people have had enough.
Mass protests erupted immediately as angry citizens took to the streets to rally against Erdoğan’s growing authoritarianism, and Erdoğan responded like an authoritarian. His administration banned social media to quash the people’s ability to organize and protest. VPN usage shot up as Turkish citizens attempted to evade the block.
why vpn usage has stayed steady
Forty-two hours after instituting the block, the Turkish authorities removed it. As I explain in my guide to the best VPNs:
VPN stands for virtual private network. Acting as a middleman, it routes all the information exchange between you and other websites’ servers on the internet, in both directions, through a server owned by the VPN service.
Should a website or a bad actor try to follow you across the web, they won’t see your unique, identifiable IP address, only that of the VPN server you’re connected to. Since these are shared servers—any decent VPN will have thousands of servers to choose from—you disappear into the crowd if a data thief or snoop tries to eavesdrop on your digital trail.
Many VPNs were already blocked in Turkey before the protests and media blackouts. Proton VPN, one of the remaining services available, reported that since the protests began on March 19, usage of its VPN has shot up 1,100 percent.
“Protecting free speech and fighting censorship is a core part of our mission, and we’re committed to doing what we can to help people around the world. Unfortunately, Turkey is one such country with a poor recent history of censorship,” David Peterson, General Manager of Proton VPN, told TechRadar.
It highlights one more reason to download a VPN: to get it while you still can, before the authorities make it harder to get once you need it worse than ever.
The post Turkey’s Social Media Ban Was Lifted, but Citizens Are Sticking With VPNs appeared first on VICE.
