Posted in: Comics | Tagged: HRL, twitter

President of Turkey Demands Twitter Remove Cartoons Critical of Him

And you thought Trump had trouble with criticism. The President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has court orders that demand Twitter delete 12 cartoons by Brazilian cartoonist Carlos Latuff and by Dutch cartoonist Ruben Oppenheimer that mock him. Eleven by Carlos, one by Ruben.

Both were told by Twitter that they had court orders to remove the tweets, had not yet followed that order, but might have to in the future.

Latuff's cartoons target Turkish military policies in Syria, how that can help ISIS, and Erdoğan's role in this.

The cartoon by Oppenheimer is more scatological, criticising Erdoğan's attempts to subdue social media sites. Ironically, what is now being done over these cartoons on Twitter. And now giving the cartoons many more eyeballs than they would have otherwise…

Here are a few of those cartoons that the Turkish President wants scrubbed from the internet… while Twitter still has them.

Ironically, Erdoğan has also been the subject of government censorship for artistic and political expression. As Mayor of Istanbul, he was stripped of his position, banned from political office, and imprisoned for four months for reciting a poem that promoted a religious point of view of government during a speech in 1998.

Erdoğan has been President of Turkey since 2014 and previously served as Prime Minister from 2003 to 2014 and as Mayor of Istanbul from 1994 to 1998. He founded the moderate conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2001, leading it to general election victories in 2002, 2007, and 2011 before standing down upon his election as President in 2014. Coming from an Islamist political background and as a self-described conservative democrat, he has promoted socially conservative and liberal economic policies in his administration.

And this social conservative doesn't like these cartoons…

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