Turkey: Church Website Blocked as 'Porn'

Thursday, June 5, 2014

By Joseph DeCaro, Worthy News Correspondent

ANKARA, TURKEY (Worthy News)-- A Turkish legislator is demanding an investigation into why the website of a Turkish church was classified as pornography and blocked online from Turkey's Grand National Assembly, according to Morning Star News.

While doing research Wednesday, Aykan Erdemir -- a legislator from Bursa with the Republican People's Party -- discovered that the website for Diyarbakir Church couldn't be accessed from Parliament because an interface screen said it was pornography.

By Thursday, the ban on the Diyarbakir Church website had been lifted, but though the ban didn't affect users outside of Parliament, Erdemir suspected that other Christian websites were being filtered out from the Internet servers servicing Parliament.

Erdemir tried to log on to Christian websites from different office computers in Parliament only to find an error message that read: "The requested URL was not found on this server" -- commonly known as a 404 error -- for almost every church website he tried to access.

Umut Ṣahin, general secretary for Turkey's Association of Protestant Churches, said it seemed that someone in Parliament had blocked "everything that had the word 'Christian' in it."