Turkey blocks Twitter, YouTube over photos

Turkish authorities have reportedly switched course and ended a brief blackout of Twitter after the company agreed to take some photos offline.

{mosads}Multiple outlets reported that the micro-blogging service was back online, after restrictions were imposed for a few hours earlier on Monday.

Service for YouTube — which was also blocked for refusing refusal to take down photos of a lawyer taken hostage in Istanbul — remains down, according to Al Jazeera.

A similar ban was initially imposed against Facebook, but was quickly lifted after the social media site complied with a court order to restrict access to some content, Reuters reported.

The government’s initial order had Internet service providers block access to a total of 166 websites on Monday, according to Hurriyet, though it’s unclear how many of them eventually acquiesced to its demand, as Twitter and Facebook appeared to do.

A Twitter spokesman was not able to comment on its resumption of service. Earlier in the day, the company had said it was “working to restore access for our users as soon as possible.”

The new restrictions came almost a year after Turkish telecommunications regulators previously blocked access to Twitter and YouTube, in the run-up to closely watched municipal elections.

That ban came in response to posted audio recordings seeming to show top aides to then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan engaging in corruption. The ban was lifted after a ruling from the country’s highest court, but not before the government came under criticism for restricting access to the Web.

The new blackout reportedly comes in response to the Internet companies’ decisions to display photos of an Istanbul prosecutor who was taken hostage by a leftist group called the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front. The photos showed the man being held at gunpoint.

The prosecutor, Mehmet Selim Kiraz, died on March 31 in a rescue operation in which two of his captors were also killed.

–This report was updated at 2:56 p.m.