Google DNS provides workaround as Turkish government blocks access to twitter

Photo: @FindikKahve

Turkish citizens, who found access to Twitter blocked yesterday in an apparent attempt by prime minister Recep Erdoğan to stem the spread of corruption allegations against him, have been able to work around the block by switching to Google’s public DNS service.

The Turkish government blocked access to Twitter by requiring local ISPs to change the DNS entries so that twitter.com could no longer be reached. As soon as the method of blocking access was discovered, a campaign started to spread the word that it could be circumvented by changing network settings to use Google’s DNS servers at 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 (update: a comment suggests the Turkish government is blocking these addresses too) … 

The Verge reports that graffiti is being used to let people know the solution, with the hashtag #DirenTwitter (‘Resist Twitter’) being used to post about the censorship.

Twitter also tweeted to say that Turkish citizens can tweet via SMS.

[tweet=https://twitter.com/policy?tw_i=446775722120458241]

The corruption allegations against Recep Erdoğan stem from recordings posted on YouTube and elsewhere in which he is seemingly giving instructions to his son to dispose of large sums of cash. You would think governments would have realised by now that attempting to block the spread of information on the Internet is almost guaranteed to be counter-productive, but it would appear not.

Instructions for using Google’s DNS servers with Windows, OS X and Linux can be found here.