Why is the presidential election in Turkey important?
In Turkey, unlike most other countries, the President has gotten the power to stay in power for longer than 2 terms. This means that the past 20 years, President Erdogan has been in power.
The past presidential elections have gone without a hitch for him, as he has been able to either run without opposition or won by a landslide and had the houses behind him.
He is a prominent Turkish politician who has been in power since 2003. He served as the Prime Minister of Turkey from 2003 to 2014 and became the country’s first directly elected President in August 2014.
Erdogan is the leader of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), a conservative political party in Turkey. With this political party being in a strong position in all political aspects in Turkey, his position seemed secure.
However, this year, challenger Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, has taken the task upon him to run for president against Erdogan with a great possibility of winning it.
And in the first round of the elections, gaining only 49.52 percent of the votes, Erdogan did not have a clear victory and the 44 percent of Kemal seemed a threat.
What SMS block has challenger Kemal gotten?
Right before the start of the second round, Kemal had received an SMS block in the country. Due to a ruling that had taken place on March 15th in court.
Using SMS is a great way in Turkey to spread a message and to get information out to the public. However, this ruling states that spreading propaganda through video, audio or written messages is prohibited.
The phone operators have received information to block all propaganda from reaching citizens through SMS and if they do not comply, they could lose their authorization to operate in Turkey.
This block puts a big hold on Kemal’s campaign and information spreading and there is no clear answer to how far this block will and can go.
The timing is quite unfortunate and people have cast doubt over the integrity of the outcome of the voting in round two. Whether it is considered democratic or not, or transparent for that matter is up for debate, even though this ban has been imposed upon legal terms in Turkey.
How do I prevent from being blocked from sending text messages?
It is important to note that blocks on text messages happen more often, but on such a big scale in prominent public sights are rare.
Blocks on sending texts are usually done by the operators. As their databases and servers control the incoming and outgoing messages, certain phone numbers or even words or phrases can be blocked from going through.
If you are the victim of a block, you are often still able to send messages through a new phone number. But buying a new SIM card every time will be expensive as well as time consuming.
Therefore one way to prevent being stuck, you could use online text message services, to account for this problem.
These online services are not tied to your phone number and allow you to send messages freely to anyone around the world. This can even be done anonymously, as your name is not tied to the service.
By using these services, you are sending your messages secure, anonymous and as fast as you would through your own phone’s SIM card, without the fear of receiving a block on your phone number.
