Lessons To Be Learned From Turkey’s Twitter Shutdown

One of the problems inherent with social networks is also the one of the biggest reasons that we use them – because other people use these networks. The likes of Facebook, Instagram, Google+ and the others wouldn’t be half as much fun if you couldn’t connect and converse with other users, or if there was no one else to like your posts and leave comments. However, what if the other people who use the networks start misbehaving?

We’re all using a communal area to share content and interact with our own networks of connections, but if enough people are deemed to have abused the service or used it for purposes considered to be illegal, then there is the risk that the whole thing may be shut down. Last week, Twitter was blocked by the Turkish government after the network had been used to distribute material that purportedly showed corruption inside Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s inner circle.

This blog is not the place to be discussing any of the political or moral issues surrounding the events, but we will look at the reality of the situation. And this reality is the fact that one day people were free to log on to Twitter and access their information and historic content, and the next day they were not. The overwhelming majority of Turkish people using Twitter will not have been responsible for the actions that caused the government to take the steps it did, however they paid the price for being part of that network.

It goes to show that even though we have every faith the content we create online will always be there whenever we may need to reference it, the unfortunate reality is that there is simply no way of knowing whether or not a network may have technical problems, be attacked by hackers, or forcibly made unavailable to you.

The best way to ensure that you can always access the content you have shared and created on social networks is to keep your own personal copy of it. You never know when you may need to look back, nor do you know if there will ever been anything stopping you from doing so when that need arises. With SocialSafe you can become the master of your own destiny when it comes to your information, by creating your own personal data library that you own and control.