EUROPE

Turkish College Student Convicted for Tweeting Satirical News Story

A provincial court in Turkey sentenced a college student to one year in prison on Thursday for the offense of “insulting a public official” by sharing a satirical news story about a regional governor on Twitter.
The student, Meral Tutcali, said in an interview that the sentence was suspended because she had no criminal record. She was warned, however, that she would be jailed if she committed another offense in the next five years.
The trial was held in Adana, a southern Turkish province, after a complaint by the region’s governor, Huseyin Avni Cos, who discovered last year that he had been mocked in a photograph and headline on Zaytung, a Turkish site akin to The Onion.
Ms. Tutcali’s criminal update to her @KeLebegindansi Twitter feed — preserved in a screen shot by journalists and shared by opposition activists — simply quoted the satirical site’s reference to the governor as more important than President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
As Turkey’s Hurriyet Daily News reported, Mr. Cos angered supporters of the protest movement in Gezi Park in Istanbul in 2013, when he was caught on video using the Turkish word for “pimp” to describe a protester.
Ms. Tutcali, a sophomore who is studying sociology at Anadolu University, said she was disillusioned by the verdict. “I don’t believe in justice anymore,” she said in a private Twitter conversation.
According to Hurriyet Daily News, Ms. Tutcali called her prosecution part of an effort by officials “to intimidate and pressure people who think differently.”
Despite the threat of prison, she eagerly shared news reports from the Turkish and international press on her legal confrontation with the governor on Twitter.
The decision was widely ridiculed on Twitter, including by Elif Batuman, a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine who was a writer-in-residence at Koc University in Istanbul from 2010 to 2013.
In January, a local court in Adana had hinted at the possibility of a total ban on social networks in Turkey, as part of an effort to block the spread of reports claiming that the country’s intelligence agency had supplied weapons to extremists fighting against President Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
Both Twitter and YouTube were blocked in Turkey last year after leaks of what were said to be government plans for a secret military operation in Syria.
The complaint about Ms. Tutcali’s Twitter commentary was filed about one month before Turkey deported an Azerbaijani journalist for “posting tweets against high-level state officials,” according to an Interior Ministry order.
That journalist, Mahir Zeynalov, confronted Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, on the question of media freedom this week during a conference in Washington. On Thursday, Mr. Zeynalov reported, he was blocked from interacting with the foreign minister on Twitter.