DHKP-C supporters recalling the killing of Berkin Elvan at a protest in Istanbul in January. Flickr / John Lubbock. Some rights reserved.
You wouldn’t have thought one photo could enrage the Turkish government so much. The photo showed a member of DHKP-C, a violent far-left group, with a gun to the head of a prosecutor investigating the case of Berkin Elvan, a 15-year-old boy killed by police during the 2013 Gezi protests.
On the surface, this photo could have had excellent propaganda uses for the Turkish government, helping to paint leftist supporters of the Gezi protests as dangerous radicals connected to terrorism. But, for some reason, the government decided that the photo was so dangerous that it used recent internet laws to censor it and block websites and Twitter accounts which published it. The Egyptian blogger Nervana Mahmoud was very surprised to find herself as the only non-Turkish Twitter account-holder to have her Tweet of the photo blocked.
