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Turkey

Censorship In Turkey: "The Allergic Reaction" Of A Corrupt Leader

Protests are on the rise, on the streets, and online
Protests are on the rise, on the streets, and online
Serdar KuzuloÄŸlu

-OpEd-

ISTANBULThe saying goes that if the word “but” is featured in a sentence, nothing that comes before it should be taken seriously. Whether this is always true, I don’t really know, but what happened after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan targeted Twitter at a political rally in Bursa reminds me of this thesis.

“We do not want the Internet to be censored, but Twitter does not recognize Turkey,” Erdogan said during one of his more tempered moments. The utterance is dangerously similar to the reasoning for Law No: 5651, also known as the Internet Act.

When it was passed in 2007, license to regulate the Internet was justified based on fears about child pornography (“OK, but do you want child pornography to be distributed easily?”). Today’s excuse is even more slick — this claim that Turkey is not being “recognized.”

But the illegal censorship we are experiencing now is neither about protecting the rights of individuals nor about silencing a few people. The Twitter ban in Egypt — which has been followed in the last few days with blocks on YouTube and Google DNS — is the allergic reaction of an embattled leader who does not tolerate criticism and expects total submission without question by his people.


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(Anon-HAS)

The latest censorship on YouTube came hours after an audio recording of a high-level security meeting was leaked on the video-sharing website, and after other recordings have of Erdogan’s indiscretions have put the leader on the political hot seat. Turkey’s telecommunications authority (TIB) made the decision as a “precautionary administrative measure.” In February, Turkey passed a controversial, much-criticized new Internet law that allows the telecommunications regulator to block websites without a court order.

The Google DNS service was banned without any administrative decision, which is no different than shutting down the entire communications infrastructure to guard against the possibility of citizens speaking undesirable things to one other. Or of shutting down the postal service over fear that someone might write something objectionable and mail it.

Blocking Twitter wholesale was equally illegal. The government defended Law No: 5651 in 2007 by saying, “From now on, the websites will not be blocked as a whole, just the parts that feature inconvenient content.”

What is this then?

The government is attempting to transfer its intolerance to the Internet by its front organization: The Presidency of Telecommunication (TIB). Even critical news from foreign newspapers is inconvenient. For example, an article from British newspaper The Guardian on the subject of censorship in Turkey was inaccessible as I was writing this column.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has a vision of Turkey in his mind that is scary for everybody but himself and his family. (Remember the kids who were taken from their homes in the middle of the night by the police because they were using their real names on Twitter during the Gezi events?) The administration is trying to silence every undesirable critic while Twitter is putting up resistance against the government to remain a venue where everybody can express ideas freely.

We all may need that someday.

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Future

AI Is Good For Education — And Bad For Teachers Who Teach Like Machines

Despite fears of AI upending the education and the teaching profession, artificial education will be an extremely valuable tool to free up teachers from rote exercises to focus on the uniquely humanistic part of learning.

Journalism teacher and his students in University of Barcelona.

Journalism students at the Blanquerna University of Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.

© Sergi Reboredo via ZUMA press
Julián de Zubiría Samper

-Analysis-

BOGOTÁ - Early in 2023, Microsoft tycoon Bill Gates included teaching among the professions most threatened by Artificial Intelligence (AI), arguing that a robot could, in principle, instruct as well as any school-teacher. While Gates is an undoubted expert in his field, one wonders how much he knows about teaching.

As an avowed believer in using technology to improve student results, Gates has argued for teachers to use more tech in classrooms, and to cut class sizes. But schools and countries that have followed his advice, pumping money into technology at school, or students who completed secondary schooling with the backing of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have not attained the superlative results expected of the Gates recipe.

Thankfully, he had enough sense to add some nuance to his views, instead suggesting changes to teacher training that he believes could improve school results.

I agree with his view that AI can be a big and positive contributor to schooling. Certainly, technological changes prompt unease and today, something tremendous must be afoot if a leading AI developer, Geoffrey Hinton, has warned of its threat to people and society.

But this isn't the first innovation to upset people. Over 2,000 years ago, the philosopher Socrates wondered, in the Platonic dialogue Phaedrus, whether reading and writing wouldn't curb people's ability to reflect and remember. Writing might lead them to despise memory, he observed. In the 18th and 19th centuries, English craftsmen feared the machines of the Industrial Revolution would destroy their professions, producing lesser-quality items faster, and cheaper.

Their fears were not entirely unfounded, but it did not happen quite as they predicted. Many jobs disappeared, but others emerged and the majority of jobs evolved. Machines caused a fundamental restructuring of labor at the time, and today, AI will likely do the same with the modern workplace.

Many predicted that television, computers and online teaching would replace teachers, which has yet to happen. In recent decades, teachers have banned students from using calculators to do sums, insisting on teaching arithmetic the old way. It is the same dry and mechanical approach to teaching which now wants to keep AI out of the classroom.

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