Since Twitter is still not doing anything about this, or responding to our inquiries, it’s time to make public what happened to our Twitter account (@defendrojava). In late July the account was suspended without explanation. In an effort to figure out what was wrong, we submitted an appeal on August 5, using the standard online form. On August 6, we received a response, entirely in Turkish. Attached was a court order with a long list of social media sites recently banned in Turkey, ours among them.
It's quite incredible that Twitter immediately and without hesitation folded to this court ban, suspended our account, and still haven't reinstated it. On August 12, we were told that the account was permanently suspended, this time on the grounds that we had violated the platform manipulation rules. (Which we haven’t. We have done nothing that even gets close to breaking any of Twitter’s rules.) What seems to be going on is that Twitter is taking direct orders from lobbyists for Turkey’s authoritarian regime.